User:Aurabarrera/sandbox

= Comparison of Civic Technology Platforms =

Civic Technology
Civic Technology is defined as technology that enables engagement, participation or enhances the relationship between the people and government by enhancing citizen communications and public decision, improving government delivery of service, and infrastructure. Civic technology platforms specifically designed to improve citizen participation in governance. We distinguished civic tech from government technology. Government technology being technology that directyl deals with government infrastructure.

Platform Types
We used the categorization on democratic innovations according to Graham Smith :


 * Electoral innovations - "aim to increase electoral turnout"
 * Consultation innovations - "aim to inform decision-makers of citizens’ views"
 * Deliberative innovations - "aim to bring citizens together to deliberate on policy issues, the outcomes of which may influence decision-makers"
 * Co-governance innovations - "aim to give citizens significant influence during the process of decision-making"
 * Direct democracy innovations - "aim to give citizens final decision-making power on key issues"
 * E-democracy innovations - "use information technology to engage citizens in the decision-making process"

Draft #1 Outline
Introduction to civic technology topics. Link to the civic technology wikipedia article and maybe other background information on the categorization of different technologies.

The initial comparison should comprise of these categories: the software name, creator, initial release date, software license, programming language, business model. Can also include a consideration of privacy and data policies that they have open.

The target audience should incorporate: public, private, enterprise, education, personal, scientific.

Features on the software specifically can compare in the different categories: campaign, government, voting, etc. Then compare features specific to to each for example in the voting platforms it can compare if there are ways to create a campaign and preliminary steps to confirm user identity.

Initial Overview
Currently there is no comparison of civic technology platforms the closest is this list of civic tech companies and the civic tech article. But we would want ot make a comparison like the wiki software comparison.

Some other sources that would be helpful is a yearly list of companies in the civic tech space and start-ups in the civic tech. I would also include the platforms that we had guest speakers about and ones that were included in our syllabus.

Firechat
This is the existing article: FireChat.

Currently the article is a stub with one or two sentences for each topic. What I would add is the use of Firechat for emergency disaster uses. From my research I saw that it grew in popularity with the hurricanes in 2017 and that the company itself was creating a product called alerts to help the emergency responders get their message to people when there is no wifi. There is also not a lot on the background of the product's makers and the ways the product has been monetized. Also including a more in-depth explanation about the technology behind it could help people understand how it works.

Comparison Chart of Civic Technology Platforms
This would be a new article. It is necessary to compare them and define different types of civic tech. There is a similar page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software.

This is helpful because there are many platforms in many different categories of civic tech but they have different business models, products, and technologies related to them. As the field of civic tech grows it would be very helpful to be able to look at existing and past civic tech platforms. Such a comparison can help the future producers of civic tech find the best fit using the examples listed.

= Article evaluation = Things to consider
 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Evaluation of Socrata Wikipedia Page
All the information in the page is relevant to the subject matter. They have a section for history, a section where they talk about the problem Socrata was made to solve named "the government data dilemma". In this section the writing is less neutral by framing the problem and it reads kind of like a mission statement, where Socrata is shown to be solving the problem for government data. They use the words They have a section called technology where they talk about the data as a service then there is a subsection where they describe the machine learning that Socrata provides called Datalens. Then there is a section that covers the products that Socrata offers such as Open Data, Performance Management, Financial Insights, Citizen Connect, and Open Data API. It is useful to have a list of customers and funding sources to trace where the money comes from. The article is mostly neutral. It talks about how Socrata is solving the data problem. The views that are represented are the views of Socrata and an outsider's perspective on the technology. There aren't any viewpoints from Socrata's customers, like perspectives about the product and how it works from their point of view. Two of the links are broken, there aren't sources for a lot of the sections. The sections missing sources are the descriptions of the products and the customer list, we can assume that they might have been taken from the Socrata website. The sources are all reputable news sources except for the two links that are broken. There is no talk page