Response to Feedback on Knowsy
Referencing the Following Posts
Clarification and Responses
What is Locality?
In our app Knowsy, cities and municipalities and other government boundaries are not used as a concept. Instead, we use location centers and radii to connect projects and legislation to users (legislation is given a bigger radii than a project). We made this design decision not only because of the simplicity of implementation, but because we agreed with Shaw Chen's point that two neighboring houses could be members of two different boroughs but will experience similar consequences of a nearby project.
This radius is what allows a user to interact by post, comment, poll, or etc. with the project. Otherwise, a non-local user only has viewing rights.
Polling and Majority vs. Minority
First, this app is not designed to host the final vote on a project. Polls are created and used by the residential members who live close (under the radius limit) to the relevant project. Thus, minorities that live in the area's voices are sampled and whether or not they WIN the majority vote, their voices are heard by the percentage of they vote on the polls as well as the "Opinions" style comment/response summaries of the pro, middle ground, and con case. This adds value to the system of the status quo, which has no efficient sampling apparatus for minorities or residents in general.
City Specified Projects
Both professors DNJ and Arvind asked us to consider switching our project/legislation source from the public/users to official government documents. There is a tradeoff our team thus considered: Knowsy would benefit because the content would be more official/reliable/relevant than if we crowdsourced our foundational material, but then users of Knowsy would lose the democratic anarchist full control of what the app couldbe used to track and receive information top-down about what projects to discuss and consider. For the MVP, we decided to take their advice because it Is in fact easier to program, but this is something we're thinking about.