Quae Update February 2022

We’ve been cooking up something special.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve last updated our interface, as well as introduced new substantial features. Since then we’ve been racking our brains on how to introduce our representative platform to countless organizations that wouldn’t have even considered it before.

These updates include:

• Sub-Communities — groups within groups
• Procedures — automate complex voting with multiple groups/sub-communities
• Member Initiatives — anyone can start an initiative now
• The Global Community — share polls with everyone
• Invitations — easily join new communities and initiatives
• Rewards — get recognition for your good ideas

Sub-Communities (SCs)

Since the beginning, we’ve known that our communities would have to have a representative hierarchy, and we developed sub-organizations in the past, but they did not meet the standards nor the requirements we knew that members would need.

Our new sub-communities (SCs) behave exactly like any other community on the platform, except there are some limitations. In order to join these SCs, you must first be a member of the parent community.

We’ve designed our SCs to behave like a tree, with communities having the potential to be interconnected through procedures which I’ll explain later.

SCs have their own unique feed, in which members of one SC can write a proposal to be voted on by only members of the same SC. This can provide an architecture of suggestive decision-making in organizations that will trickle upwards to the highest parent community.

For example, the United States may operate as the parent community, but each state can behave like an SC. Each state may practice its own form of decision-making, which may be independent of any other state’s practice. But these decisions will eventually affect the United States as a whole.

Procedures

Procedures give communities the ability to create a system for how proposals are handled and enacted. The best way I can explain it is with an example:

If the United States is planning on amending the constitution they’d have to go through multiple voting phases:

Phases when amending the US Constitution

• First, the designated writers of an amendment in one possible route are House members and Senators. Any one of these politicians can propose an amendment to the US constitution.
• Next are the voting phases. First, the House and Senate must individually approve the new amendment with a 2/3 majority. After it’s approved here, it must move to the states. 3/4 of the states must also approve of the amendment and once this happens, the US constitution is amended!

Coming back to Quae, we were able to recreate this process in a secure, easy-to-use feature for community administrators. Any one of the communities on our platform can design and adopt a procedure which is our term for any kind of process a community admin wants to make.

A procedure could be broad like an amendment, referendum, legislation, etc. Or it could be specific, such as a capital improvement request. Any admin on our platform can distribute the writer privilege or voter privilege to specific SCs at each phase of the procedure. Members will see newly posted procedure posts on their feed and vote if they are allowed to.

Another thing that is fun to think about are the endless possibilities because, with SCs and procedures combined, any SC can develop their own procedures unique to them, and implement them into their workflow. We’ve toyed with the idea of allowing communities to create procedure templates to be shared with others on the platform, but that feature can wait for another day.

Member Initiatives

In the past, only administrators were allowed to start initiatives in their community. However, we noticed that regular members were creating proposals on the feed with the intention of having them be made into initiatives. We initially thought, “This works, because administrators will have the time and resources to cover these member-driven initiatives.”

We were wrong.

Administrators are limited by the tools and resources given to them to start initiatives so they won’t be able to consider most of the members’ proposals. So, we decided to allow for members to start their own initiatives and gain support from other members so that individuals can manage the growth and once an initiative gains enough visible support, admins can take it from there.

It’s important to allow for our community administrators to still have their designated powers, but we also wanted to make it possible for their workload to be minimized by the tools Quae offers. One of these methods is initiatives, and we’re excited to see what members will create.

The Global Community

At the end of the day, there’s one community that we’re all a part of, and that is the human race. We’ve always wanted to make it possible for anyone to sign up for Quae and use it from the start, and this is what the Global Community (GC) accomplishes.

The GC allows for all Quae members to be able to write proposals and start initiatives that are visible to everyone on the platform. Currently, this is all the GC is limited to, but as time goes on we hope to develop new design architectures to further expand the Global Community on Quae.

Invitations

Prior to this update, invitations were very simple, communities you were invited to would show up in your list of communities, and that’s it. This wasn’t an optimal experience, we realize, so we recreated the process from the ground up. Instead of receiving these invites alongside your other communities, you can check the invitations page!

Not only can you be invited to communities but you can also be invited to initiatives. But the methods in which you’re allowed to invite people are different depending on where your community/initiative is positioned.

Here are the invitation methods according to their access points:

Parent Communities and Global Initiatives:

• Email
• Contacts (on mobile)

Community Initiatives:

• Members of the community

Sub-Communities:

• Members of the parent community

We’re considering increasing the social opportunities for the platform but we’d rather play it by ear, instead of forcing it to become too social. We’ve always been hesitant to position Quae as a social media platform, which is why we’re extra careful on this front.

Rewards

Rewards on Quae were introduced on a soft update during the holidays, but we’ve since redesigned its access points. Rewards can be divided into two sections: Tokens and Influence.

Influence

One of your most important metrics to keep up within your community is influence. Your influence is dependent on your vote-to-post ratio. It is calculated by the total amount of votes you’ve received on your proposals divided by the number of members multiplied by the number of proposals you’ve made.

This creates a number between 0 to 1 that measures your effectiveness as a proposal writer.

We don’t expect many people to have insanely high ratios but this number is a good gauge into how influential you are in your community, hence the name.

Tokens

Tokens are an actual currency that can purchase benefits that your community offers. For example, the Stevens Institute of Technology community currently offers Grub Hub gift cards to students who earn enough tokens.

It’s important to keep in mind that the benefits offered by one community are exclusively purchasable with the tokens earned from that community.

How are tokens earned? Through voting and proposing. Basically, the more active you are on Quae, the higher the number of tokens you will earn. This incentivizes member participation so that admins can gain more feedback.

Where do these benefits come from? Currently, we are providing gift cards for Stevens students, but we hope to implement features for administrators to handle benefit control by themselves. This will allow for endless possibilities for communities to offer amazing benefits for their members which will incentivize people to join.

Where are we headed?

We’re working 40+ hours a week on Quae (keep in mind we’re also college students) but we’re doing this because it’s our passion. Personally, I’ve never felt more motivated in my life than when I’m working on Quae. I believe I speak for everyone who’s on Team Quae when I say, we love our members.

We have big ideas in mind for Quae’s future. It’s the only platform that makes democratization possible for any community, big or small. We’re extremely thankful to be in anyone’s thoughts and we hope you stick along for the ride. We’re here to make the future more democratic, for all people, in all parts of the world.

New UI

Credit to Brendan Probst

In addition to introducing new features, we also redesigned the user interface (UI) and improved the user experience (UX).

New Look

An effort was put into refining the look and feel of the app. In designing the web application, I learned how to create a better-looking home page, which was then updated on the mobile app.

The Home Screen has been redesigned with a more minimalist look

The Rewards Screen, which you can access from the home page, has a fresh new look too.

The Profile Screen has also been updated to include an inbox and initiatives you are a member of.

Procedures

The UI for creating procedures allows admins to add each new phase as a step in the process. Once they’ve entered a name for the procedure and selected which organizations are allowed to write proposals for them, they can pick the order that organizations vote in as well as the required turnout and consensus.

An example procedure in the feed (left) and the procedure focused (right).

You can view the progress being made on the procedure posts that will show up in your feed. You can quickly see the current consensus and turnout of each phase.

You can also click to see more information about each phase of the procedure.

Drawer

The drawer is back in this update. We tested removing it in the last version but learned that new members found the app unintuitive without one. You can switch between communities here, access settings, and more.

The drawer shows sub-communities indented under their parent community.

Conclusions

One thing that I learned while working on this update is that it definitely takes 2 or 3 tries at something before you finally feel like it’s ready. Looking back at early versions of Quae makes me cringe just a little, but I’m glad I was able to show it to people so I could learn how to make it better. I’m really proud of how the app currently looks and functions. But I’m eager to hear from you, our members, about ways it can continue to be improved.

Please send us some feedback if you find something that seems broken, if you feel that a feature is confusing, or if you think something just looks bad.

We’re super excited to release this new update. With the release of the web app, the addition of procedures and SCs, and the fresh new look we’re ready to open Quae up to communities outside of Stevens. Please help us prepare for this by sending us any thoughts or feedback you have.

Quae

Quae is on a mission to give people the power to vote every day. Amplify your voice and take action in your community.

Send us a note, we’d love to hear from you: info@quae.app