By Jacob Caggiano
There’s a lot of civic technology efforts out there building great things, but for the most part, the solutions are focused on a certain jurisdiction. In April 2014, coders, journalists and activists met in Santiago Chile for PoplusCon to change this.
Poplus is now underway with a set of components that are designed to make any civil society out there stronger.
“Civic websites often need the same basic functionalities, no matter what kind of legislature or form of government they operate within. At Poplus we have been trying to build technologies that can save us all time and money by re-using each others work.
We call the resulting software Poplus Components. They are open source and are available for anyone to use for free.”
Soon, governments will be able to have public transcripts that look like they’re from the 21st century (SayIt), a better way to solicit feedback from constituents (WriteIt), a better way to draft, store, and track bills and other public documents (BillIt), mapping standards that match administrative borders (MapIt), and and up to date list of who does what in government that civic organizations can actually use (PopIt).
See more at Poplus.org