SimpleGov
'Take initiative and start a project to make changes in your neighbourhood.'
SimpleGov is an online platform that promotes modern dialogue between citizens and government through projects.
Civic initiatives have never been so effective. The website has been launched in the US and runs on AWS.
The functionality demonstrates the possibilities that the MediaWiki platform offers: virtually unlimited.
SimpleGov wanted to build a cloud platform to optimize public policy through direct dialogue between citizens and local, state and federal officials. Designed to be used by advocates, thought leaders and community organizations to empower their advocacy and outreach.
To achieve this goal we started off to collect all information on Agencies and Officials ( contact details and images )
and imported them in MediaWiki. Since we are talking tens of thousands of pages of information, that all needed to be
queried, a new extension was written for this called WSSSD (Simple Storage Database).
At the same time our designers created various mockups for the design of SimpleGov and eventually build the look and
feel of the website while others created specific functionalities that were needed like:
- complete rights management system
- extensive voting/rating system
- ability to show information on third party website
- search abilities through Elastic Search (also map based searching)
- all pages are editable through forms, so editing the source of a page was no longer necessary (Done with the extension WSForm)
Everything was built by keeping in mind that the platform should easily be used for other purposes as well.
It is now an intuitive, user friendly and social platform that has an "app" feel to it. Ready for the future.
