Building Showupia: A gamified take on Democracy

In 2018, we were challenged to build a budgeted PokemonGo like app that is targeted to make democracy more accessible, inclusive, and effective through advocacy, education, and community building.

It was a passion project of our client and he had ideas that were out of the ordinary but sounded fun.

Mainly there were three major goals that the app wanted to achieve:

1. Democracy Advocacy: They actively campaign for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), a voting system designed to reduce the chances of spoiler candidates and ensure majority-supported winners. They do this through local organising, community outreach, and educational initiatives.
2. Civic Engagement: They offer resources and training to help people build stronger communities and advocate for change. This includes workshops on improvisation for better communication and collaboration within organisations, as well as resources on strategic political transformation.
3. Building a Network: They connect people who share their values and want to be involved in making democracy more delicious (effective and enjoyable). This includes local chapters, partner organisations, and a community forum.

We developed an app for iOS platform. There was an admin panel built using react app where admins can perform CRUD operations for different features of the app. Here is a break down of all the features and their descriptions:

Politician | Portals | Sheeples

Capture Sheeples

Sheeples is a currency and you have to capture them. Capturing sheeples is easy to find and capture. There are two ways you can capture a sheeple:

1. Shake your phone
2. Shout at your phone

We used capabilities of iOS library to have Core Audio to detect shouting and shake sensors in iPhone to detect shake motion.

Capture Politicians

When you capture a politician it gives you information access like their phone number and twitter etc. To capture a politician you need to have enough sheeples captured and then with a simple rank choice vote question you’ll be capturing a politician.

The politicians are randomly placed on the map means unlike sheeples the politicians will be spread across the maps and will randomly move to a different location than the location of origin which an admin will add from admin panel.

Portals

Portals are simple web links that an admin can add using the admin panel. It opens a web-view and the idea was to provide link for anything and people can select that portal on map to view that link at a particular place they are at.

Portals also limit people to spend sometime on the link. So, this is something that they want people to spend sometime in the portal.

Adding GIFs around the map

You can personalised the Showupia world yours by adding GIFs with a message attached to it. If your GIF and messages gets picked it’ll become visible to anyone near that area. The intention of this feature was so that people can drop messages around politicians offices and other places like if they are gathered at a place to protest and some others.

To add it you can long press on the place where you want to drop it on map. It’ll open GIPHY as we integrated it’s SDK and then write a message with it and it’ll start displaying at the place.

Making an Alliance

You can make an alliance with other users. But its different than just tapping on a button and you start following them. Both users have to be at the same location and the app ensure that by checking that how far the users are from each-other at the time of making an alliance. If they are close enough only then an alliance is made. This feature was requested so that people actually go out and not only be a keyboard activists. After you are in alliance with a user you can chat with them anytime.

If you’re interested in learning the same approach we used in building this mobile app here is the tutorial link:

Develop Pokemon Go type game using google maps for iOS in Swift 4 — Tutorial

Admin Panel

All the options features can be controlled by the admin panel. We built it using react-bootstrap and its responsive.

Here are some more screens:

An admin can add things on the map, control basically everything about the showupia world. The app is live on iOS and you can download and have a look at it today. It was last updated in 2021 and has been the same since.

‎Showupia

If you have a dream project that is out of the ordinary and want a team that is ready to take any challenge, let’s chat and unlock the potential hidden your idea.