About My Project

Hi! My name is Reed and I’m a senior at Emma Willard School. I’m passionate about history, community organizing, politics, debate, and journalism.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a number of conversations with people who have good ideas about how to improve their communities but are either disillusioned with politics or are under-informed and feel shut out from local government. By creating an nonpartisan, minimally political app for community engagement, I hope to encourage increased participation in Troy politics by giving people a virtual space to learn about and engage with local issues. After initial online contact, users with similar agendas would be able to meet up in real life and collaboratively express their ideas and concerns to local government.

The app will also include features such as local news, community calendars, petitions, user-composed opinion pieces, and information about local leaders, candidates for office, and ballot measures. My long term goal is to set up a collaborative system through which the app can expand and be continually updated by a group of administrators in each city and town it functions in.

I’m not really a tech person, so I anticipate that the coding part of this is going to be a bit of an adventure. Thanks for following along!