What does it take to build a successful civic application? At Google we believe it is important to focus on the user. During this session we will present some of our user research.
In the last year we’ve learned a great deal about the users and developers of civic technology: the citizen, the government and the civic activist.
We will get to understand what drives a citizen in becoming active online and how technology can support them to become active. We will learn what common barriers governments and civic technologists face in developing a their applications. At the end of this session you should be better equipped to design actions and mobilization platforms that can optimally activate citizens. We will start the workshop with several presentations after which we will ask participants of the workshop to share their cases and discuss why their civic applications were a success or failure. We will try to come up with a list of essential requirements for different types of civic applications and publish best practices.