Introducing SetGov
Helping You Build Better Communities
Background
In the United States, our growing public obsession with Washington D.C. often comes at the cost of attention to our local communities. City governments oversee police departments, schools, economic development, and many other vital public services. However, turnout in local elections rarely exceeds 40% in major US cities and often drops below 20% (compared to 55–60% turnout in presidential elections). Furthermore, attendance at city council meetings is typically very low, sometimes numbering in the dozens in cities with over a million residents.
Lack of public participation in local government processes can lead to decisions that don’t accurately reflect the values or desires of the community. It is difficult for a city councilman to judge widespread public opinion when only 1 in 5 citizens vote and an even smaller handful attend and speak at meetings. The citizens who do so are comparatively much more effective in advancing their beliefs in the discussion surrounding any topic at hand.
The Problem
When explaining their lack of engagement in local politics, people most often cite a lack of knowledge and/or time. To learn about upcoming city council meetings, citizens must find and use government webpages that are poorly search engine-optimized, difficult to navigate, and built with little to no visual design. This creates a terrible user experience and prevents many from finding the information they seek. Official election webpages have similar issues and citizens often depend on newspapers or local TV news for updates, leaving substantial room for improvement via digital technologies.
Existing civic apps like iCitizen have attempted to better inform politicians of their constituents’ opinions on different topics. However, they fail to empower users to make tangible changes to their communities, instead trusting politicians to take advantage of the company’s demographic reporting. We seek a solution to help citizens become directly engaged in the local political process by increasing digital accessibility of upcoming events and elections.
Our Solution
At SetGov, we believe better-informed citizens lead to better political results. Our goal is to establish a central hub for users to learn about upcoming meetings and elections, watch live video from important events, compare candidate positions before voting, and participate in topic-focused discussions with other users. By dramatically reducing the time and number of data sources it takes to get the necessary information, we hope to bring a much larger proportion of informed citizens into the fold of community decision-making.



Data is automatically collected from relevant government webpages and converted into a user-friendly interface, showing citizens the time, address, and agenda details of upcoming meetings. For those who are unable to attend in person, live video is provided where available to give citizens a view of the process from home. Users are also able to leave comments and vote on a Reddit-style discussion board, giving them the opportunity to share opinions about relevant topics and identify the most popular positions.
The next update will include information about upcoming elections in each city, showing which offices or referendums are included. Relevant data will be collected to provide a side-by-side view of candidates and their positions on local issues, allowing users to quickly make informed decisions about their choices. Push notifications will remind the user of the registration deadline and the night before/morning of the election to encourage follow-through.
In addition to election features, geographic growth, and iterative improvements, our goals include using natural language processing to reduce the content of dry, hours-long meetings into a digestible summary that highlights important topics and allows users to search through content of interest. Upcoming releases will also seek to identify particularly important or controversial items on city agendas from news data, drawing extra attention to specific events within the app.
SetGov is still in development so all feedback is welcomed at admin@setgov.com. Version 1.0 will be released in the App Store this week and includes Boston and Fort Lauderdale as our earliest cities. We plan to include Phoenix, Austin, San Jose, and Miami in the coming months. If you’d like to request a city, please reach out to the same email address.
