CivicHub

CivicHub is a powerful online platform that helps coordinate and then amplify community voices. The aim is to ensure that development initiatives actually meet community needs and that these are delivered in an effective and timely manner.

The initial development was done as part of the 1st ever Pacific Hackathon https://picisoc.devpost.com/ sponsored by the UNDP in partnership with PICISOC on 12-13 April 2022.

Inspiration / Motivation

We want to ensure that development initiatives actually meet the needs of the communities it intends to serve and that these initiatives are delivered in an effective and timely manner. We decided to develop a platform that facilitates, manages and amplifies the voices of those communities so that their needs are met.

What it does

Accepts, organises and gathers feedback on submissions from the public. Once submissions have been agreed upon then these can be taken to various decision making bodies for approval. If approved the implementation / outcomes can be then be tracked. See a detailed breakdown here: https://civichub.govcrate.com/

How we built it

We focused in on the core issues faced by PIANGO

• The amount of time and effort needed to deal with submissions being received from multiple channels and managing the back and forth via email and other mediums
• Difficulty of having to manually track the status of submissions / position papers that were sent in i.e. what was decided?, who was doing what and by when? etc.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was trying to understand what the needs and the issues that the users were facing and then turning those into a list of system requirements that could be implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to put a team together at the last minute and being able to deliver a working prototype

What we learned

It is very difficult to build sustainable businessess models for NGO's in the Pacific due to funding constraints

What's next for CivicHub

2 things

1. We'd like to do integrate CivicHub with Flarum, the open source forum system to handle discussions around the submissions that are made.
2. We'd like to expand the system to create a citizen engagement platform that helps coordinate and amplify the voices of citizens directly. This may increase the probability for creating a more sustainable business model for the platform.