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Democracy Analysis Project

If the goal is to create a new website or software that aims to improve politics, we need to first do some market research for what already exists. This project aims to create and maintain a comprehensive collection of organizations, websites, software and projects which aim to improve government and politics.

We will not try to do a detailed analysis because that takes time and its difficult to keep updated. Instead we want to put all these entities in different categories, note their main features and other notable details that any reader would like to know. This series of pages or reports may be called another name such as 'Directory of Democracy related Projects'.

The goal is not to list/examine/identity every single politics-related website or organization but to look at the ones that are note-worthy because of the amount of impact they've had or some other unique/interesting aspect.

We can have different types of reports:

  • Software Related to Government
  • List of Organizations or Groups (sometimes a group may or may not have software that they are working on)
  • List important/notable organizations first
  • List small initiatives later (e.g. those with only one or a few people actively participating in its activities. This is also where the DOD group would be fall under)

Categorization / Classification

Any kind of for-profit group that is charging money for software or other services should be given a low priority for displaying them in the analysis and these groups should be displayed on a separate page with a relevant notice at the top. A column can be created in the Analysis table for "For-profit".

Other tables can be: Rank (priority for analysis which is also related to the amount of impact the group is having), Classification (App, Software or Organization etc)

Plans for the Analysis Project

  1. PLANNING. Initial plans on what kinds of reports to have. Discuss with the team these things:
    • Scan the Links page and gain an overall understanding of what kinds of reports or pages could be created for this Analysis project
    • Scan the Javul.org Apps page as well
    • Create a general description of the Analysis project and sub-reports that it will have, and the tasks that need to be completed for this project
  2. EXECUTION: Find Talent on Upwork, and ask them to bid on the projects and give a sample of their analysis, creativity skills and quality of work. Stages of the project:
    1. CREATE MASTER LIST: Find links that contain links to other websites. Compile these links somewhere. This will be the 'master' list. We will use various search words to find other lists of sites. For Apps, search those last. Find only significant apps (with a lot of feedback or if they are associated with an organization)
    2. CREATE LIST OF CATEGORIES: First get categories form old Apps list and then think of which ones to add
    3. PLAN ANALYSIS (needs advice from team). Decide on what kind of data to show for the websites (categories.. anything else?).
    4. Some guidelines: We'll have different pages for major items and insignificant smaller items. Apps and Software will have their own pages. Links can be duplicated.
    5. START ANALYSIS: Analysis involves creating summaries of the websites and apps in the Master list and assigning categories and other data for them

Next Steps: Filter and Quick Categorization

Next steps for me:

  • Create ad for Upwork

Every link from the 800 links list needs to be looked at quickly.

  1. Quick categorization of links not related to what we're looking for
  2. Combine everyone's categories into one list and use those categories. Work in the Google doc XL list, it will be faster than the wiki (later import into wiki when all done).
  3. Mark more interesting links for further analysis (the ones we're looking for)