Documentation

CivicSphere is a politically-neutral, inclusive, accessible platform to aid political action by fostering political discussions while ensuring compliance to end-user privacy to avoid political targeting or persuasion.

Why?

• Lack of personalization in traditional channels resulting in lack of understanding of nuances of content or local policies for civilians, resulting in passive engagement or disengagement from local policy decision making and political activities.

• Lack of a platform for unbiased, politically neutral discussions, especially regarding local politics on mainstream social networking and blogging sites due to polarization and invasive algorithms (for user personalization) which profiles users, breaching responsible AI practices, privacy and the user's interests.

• Lack of accessibility and inclusion in traditional channels due to language barriers and alternative content format, resulting in disengagement and marginalization of underrepresented people from local politics.

• Fragmentation of political information resulting in barriers to knowledge and understanding of local politics, causing poor political decisions and stagnancy of society due to lack of awareness and action.

Design

Personalization

CivicSphere aims to combat the lack of personalization in traditional channels without compromising on user's privacy or subjecting user to biased content like mainstream social networking sites by leveraging an interest-based personalization approach, which helps in delivery of hyperlocal content to end users in a community network (particular to a region). Furthermore, the platform aims to be an unified interface aggregating local political information in a centralized and easily accessible manner.

Safety, Inclusion and Accessibility

CivicSphere aims to be a safe, welcoming and inclusive space for people to discuss and engage in local political matters in a neutral manner. Accessibility features aids in participation from underrepresented people irrespective of their background or knowledge on language or technology, thus the platform is manually tested for accessibility using screen readers such as TalkBack and Orca and content delivery style to ensure accessibility of information. The content is actively moderated for ensuring psychological safety and avoiding factually incorrect content.

Political Neutrality

The platform should not facilitate or engage users in biased manner and the chat interface agent must provide neutral, grounded and factual responses using external knowledge sources to ensure explainability and compliance to responsible AI.

Responsible AI and Privacy

CivicSphere is developed with responsible AI in mind, ensuring sensitive information isn't provided to LLMs and processed using custom services and that user data is used with transparency, fairness, inclusion and accountability in mind with privacy being treated as a default than a nice-to-have. This aids in protection of political interests of potentially vulnerable user population from misuse.

This fosters trust among end users, resulting in better political engagement and awareness.

Development

Check out our GitHub for open issues and our roadmap for getting started with development.