Words to votes: Making politics more meaningful
Why are millennials so afraid of political news? How do you create more informed voters?
The Editors Lab hackathon in Seoul, South Korea, sought to find answers to those universal questions back in March 2017, in time for the upcoming presidential elections.
Since then, a lot has changed for Rayoon Hyung, So Young Han and Dongmin Shin, the creators of Deep_tionary — a prototype to make elections jargon-free and easier for millennials to follow. Their name, for one.
The trio participated as Team Deepr, but since all of the three are still students, and only Hyung works with Deepr full-time, they’ve decided to branch out and develop their prototype as a startup. So Deep_Tionary is now called MeanIt — which sounds like ‘minute’, or a quick analysis; brings out the election details, like the minutes of a meeting; and of course, the meaning of a word.
The team found that in political news, the often-heavy, tedious tone, rampant jargon and importantly, a lack of context puts young readers off.
Here’s how the prototype aims to fix that: Deep_tionary, or MeanIt, as the venture is now called, is a crowdsourced dictionary platform that allows users to define trending political words or phrases.
“Sort of like Urban Dictionary, but for politics — and more fun”
Users can define terms, and can upvote the most relevant definitions. These definitions can be in multiple formats: text (100 characters), links to articles or editorials, embedded tweets or YouTube videos, and memes supported by the GIPHY API. These are formats that millennials are constantly engaging with, and ones they have fun with.
The platform showcases a set of terms on its home page, tagged under ‘Words of the Day’, along with definitions — these are culled from Twitter trending topics, and news platforms.
The idea is that once words start making sense, users will be more inclined to read stories that use them. So when a user clicks a particular word, a sidebar will show stories that include it. Hyung adds:
“You can also graph a word to see how its meaning and context has changed over time, in relation with the election candidates. It’s really interesting to see how the narrative evolves.”
MeanIt can work as both a web platform as well as a Chrome extension.
Since participating in the Editors Lab finals in Vienna, the team’s developer, Dongmin Shin, has parted ways with them. Juho Sun has taken his place.
“We strived together for a few months, and we’ve finally completed our beta version 1.0,” says Hyung. “So far, we have collected about 1,300 data/posts from focus group tests.”
There’s more good news for the team. They presented the beta version to Mediati, a startup accelerator in Seoul, and have successfully garnered a $35,000 investment. MeanIt is on its way to becoming a full-fledged startup.
The team hopes to launch the final product by October, but have a few challenges to solve before that.
“It’s not easy to make it as a media startup in Korea, where legacy media still dominates — but that makes it exciting too,” says Hyung. She adds:
“We want to empower millennials to make informed electoral decisions, in a language that works for them. We feel so grateful — none of this would have been possible without Editors Lab.”
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