By John Robinson | September 12, 2022
calendar_month
Built in September 2022
schedule
3 Months
build_circle
SwiftUI, iOS
The idea
This was our first project as OnlyForward and we wanted to start by building something socially impactful. With declining trust in the government and provincial elections suffering from their lowest voter turnout in years (31%), we felt that there was a better way to get citizens more engaged. Gov’r was an iOS app designed to help citizens quickly discover who represents them and provide a new channel for direct dialog with their political representatives. You could ask your elected representatives questions and get back 1-3 minute long video responses in a modern TikTok-style format.
Why this idea?
As we talked to citizens, we found that most people didn’t know who represented them, what they did day-to-day or how to meaningfully engage them if they had concerns about an issue.
By building a new tool for engagement, we hoped to learn:
Could we make it quick and easy for citizens to see the people that represent them in one place?
Would making it easier for elected reps to share what they are working on directly with their constituents grow trust with citizens?
Would providing modern methods for citizens to ask questions, share concerns and get answers from their elected reps increase citizen engagement?
Would representatives be open to engaging directly with their constituents on a new platform?
How it works
Download the app and enter your postal code
Follow your representatives and candidates
Ask a question and have it sent directly to your representative or candidate
See the response and the responses to other citizens in your riding in your personalized feed
What’d we learn?
We started way too late. We had a finished product and started recruiting candidates to answer questions with only weeks left to go in the election. We quickly learned that getting time from candidates that late in the game was tough.
Citizens were less informed than we anticipated. We had lots of citizens who asked questions to the wrong levels of government or simply wanted to rant. Something we could’ve probably improved on.
Elected reps and candidates already felt the existing social media tools were onerous and were unclear how this new channel fits in.
Even then, Gov’r attracted around 30 MPPs, 30 City Councilors candidates to reply to voters on the platform.
We intended to launch on iOS as a prototype and if we got traction, launch on Android. We quickly discovered that outside of our team’s iOS bubble, a surprising majority of the candidates and constituents were on Android.
We peaked at a few thousand daily active users, which was ok for a late election launch. Gov’r was sunset shortly after the election as we did not feel the app was having the positive impact we were hoping for. It turns out course correcting democracy takes more than a few weeks of design and engineering. Who woulda thought!
