Civic Love

Climate change has already displaced 18 million people, and takes over 8,4 million lives yearly due to air pollution only.  Yet, we lack ways to take on these challenges as communities. Civic engagement has hit an all-time low with half the population in the US not feeling civically engaged, particularly among youth. The effects of this phenomena can be seen in the fraying of social fabric, polarized populations, increasing economic divisions, and the decline in government trust. How can citizens be re-engaged by connecting and taking action together within their communities?

Civic Love is a Tinder-like platform allowing citizens and grassroots organizations to propose and vote/swipe on ideas to improve their communities, while simultaneously matching them with each other to rebuild our social fabric. It re-engages people in political and civic action by combining the social dynamics of dating with the power of local knowledge to solve problems in cities.

Indoor and outdoor air pollution have become one of the most pressing issues worldwide, impacting our health, agriculture, and economies, taking over 8,4 million lives yearly and threatening 91% of the world population who live in areas that exceed the WHO limits. Especially affecting vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries, which already account for 90% of the deaths. Although large international efforts are been put onto regulating air quality standards. We still lack scalable means and mechanisms for individuals and communities to take on climate challenges like air pollution locally and daily.  

Can we create a platform that let people with lived experiences of these problems lead solutions?

We believe air pollution should not be addressed only at institutional levels, individuals and communities have the capacity and the appetite to disrupt the way we approaching climate issues. Yet, digital platforms alone won’t help address wicked challenges, we need to learn to harness thin public participation and mistrust through digital platforms to activate thick civic engagement and take collective action to solve local air pollution issues in households, transportation systems and neighborhoods. Whistl, augmenting the visibility of community concerns, experiences and knowledge. 

The Civic Love ecosystem responds to a need for new paths to thick engagement experienced by community groups around the world. 

The first phase of the project will include co-design workshops with stakeholders including non-profits, engaged citizens, city governments, youth groups, community centers, and neighborhood activists in Bogota. These groups will be recruited through our team’s deep networks in Colombia, Finland, Peru, and New England, including Boston area groups working on social, environmental and data justice. The idea for this ecosystem is informed by our on-the ground experience with grassroots organizations that have the knowledge and experience to make positive local impacts but may lack the networks to get their ideas out there and the human resources to realize these innovations in their community. At the same time, many people are eager to contribute to their community in this important political time, but they enjoyable way would to find and participate in projects that realize the change they want to see in the world.  group co-design process will ensure that the designed system reflects the needs of the community and optimizes potential for engagement.

Our solution is comprised of two components: a digital platform and a physical gathering. The digital platform will be a social search website for the creation and diffusion of civic engagement ideas. Embodied in the form of an app/website, the platform serves as mediator between organizations, citizens, and any public or private grassroot institutions that want to develop new civic initiatives.. Individuals and organizations can submit ideas/proposals in response to a challenge (e.g. raising awareness around air pollution in a given neighbourhood) and have citizens voting on them using a Tinder-like interaction. As people swipe and participate on advancing solutions, our algorithm will progressively match them with someone who shares similar values.  

Each solution will be brought together at a physical gathering where people and organizations who were matched meet and set the chosen ideas into action. Our local teams will ensure that the gathering addresses multiple dimensions of the challenge, engages stakeholders at a systemic level, and produces tangible outcomes. 

We will keep a map of all gatherings and challenges across every geography, produce reports and magazines showcasing community work and prepare short films. This will allow us to show progress and inspire more communities to find love and find solutions to challenges within their communities together.

The platform brings together people with common environmental interests at a local level,  in a simple and direct way. The platform’s data intensive algorithms perform idea matching, giving the opportunity to organizations and individuals to directly communicate, exchange and form new problem solving ideas.  The platform provides the basis for idea diffusion, organizing and mobilizing social groups to initiate environmentally conscious actions.

The main technology deployed in the project is a social search platform that uses AI algorithms to facilitate effective matching between individuals and organizations. The platform provides a public forum for idea creation and diffusion. To achieve that, individuals and organizations who are interested in contributing answer a set of questions that define their geographic information, scopes, interests, capabilities and ideas. This set of numerical, categorical and textual data are given to data-intensive algorithms that perform ideas’ matching. We deploy hybrid deep recommendation systems, that combine natural-language-processing and statistical learning algorithms [1]. The AI models are developed in such a way that are able to handle sparse skewed dataset inputs, cold start issues, are trainable online, updating their recommendations by each user interaction. Furthermore, the mathematical structure of the model is formed in such a way that ensures fair and diverse recommendations for the users [2]. After ideas matching, new group chats are automatically formed, where users with common interests can discuss and agree on future actions. The platform administrators then will consult and guide the emerged groups on how to optimally apply the ideas for the creation of new civic engagement projects. They administrators be responsible for promoting the organization of group gatherings, where stakeholders can meet in person to advance their projects.

1: Deep learning based recommender system: A survey and new perspectives.
2: Exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems

Addressing climate change effectively requires more than individual changes like personal water reduction. Civic Love brings people together to address air pollution and climate change at a collective level to create civic changes on climate change.

In recent years, many student and community groups have formed at the local and national level to take on climate change. These groups often have a strong digital presence and gain thousands--or even millions--of signatures on online petitions, yet local groups working on the same issues are held back by lack of in-person participation and thick engagement that leads to collective change. Civic Love creates change by creating a clear path from digital to in-person engagement that allows community groups to effectively put pressure on governments and companies to make civic change. 

In particular, our team’s 10+ years of on-the-ground experience in Colombia informs the development of Civic Love's and our launch in Bogota. Based on this experience, our map to change includes (1) high individual interest in addressing air pollution that is experienced through day-to-day health impacts and (2) high social desire to participate in “online dating” like digital platforms that can be leveraged by (3) effective connections with on-the-ground civic networks that can be channeled this energy into (4) collective on the ground lobbying and impact towards implementing solutions such as public transportation systems. 

Within five years, Civic Love will be serving over 20 million people around the world. In the next year, we will soft launch PROJECT in two communities: Bogota, Colombia (pop: 8 million) and Boston, Massachussettes, USA (population: 1 million). In these cities, we will directly serve 200,000 people that use the ecosystem during the soft launch, including local non-profits, community members, and city governments. The and creating cascading cultural change for the people in these communities. In the next five years, we will launch in 25 cities around the world and serve over one million people. Change the culture; social engagement in the real world facilitated through digital tools. 

Change the culture; social engagement in the real world facilitated through digital tools. These changes have the power to cascade and impact others in the community and neighboring communities even if they are not directly involved.

Our on-the-ground experience in Bogota and our decades of experience in environmental issues, co-design, and civic impact position us to effectively accomplish our goals in the next five years. We have considered a number of possible challenges to our progress on this goal and planned our approach to account for these issues. Specific potential challenges we have identified are:

(1) Malicious actors the digital platform: Many social media business are stressed by malicious actors abusing their tools. This includes fake profiles, data harvesters, catfishing, and political interference, among others. This challenges can be particularly relevant in cases that connect people both online and in person, such as online dating or transportation services.

(2) Inclusion on digital platforms: An increasing number of people have access to and comfort with digital platforms, from phone-based to computer-based interfaces. Yet many populations are underrepresented on digital platforms, including senior citizens and those without the financial means to access technology. 

(3) Changing political landscape: The implementation of climate change solutions is impacted by the political climate in cities, countries, and internationally. PROJECT’S ability to create change will be impacted by the elected officials in office throughout the project launch, and will also impact who is elected.  

We have planned Civic Love to ensure that we can overcome both expected and unexpected barriers throughout the next five years. Our extensive experience in technology for civic change, environmental challenges, and on-the-ground community work in Latin America position us to succeed. To address the particular challenges we identified, we will:

(1) Employ AI solutions against malicious actors: We will use AI solutions such to assist in screening posts and participation in the online platform to effectively limit the presence of malicious actors without increasing costs. This approach will be supplemented human-based screening systems and systems for participants to report suspicious behavior.

(2) Design workshops for broader participation: Our launch in Bogota will focus on populations that already have access and comfort with digital systems, while also exploring ways to include more participants in future launches. Specifically, we will hold a series of design workshops with underserved populations to find non-technical solutions for increased engagement in these activities. This may include parallel event recruiting via “old media” such as newspapers, billboards, emails, or fliers.  Our design workshops will explore additional solutions that can integrate broader participation 

(3) Alternative launch locations: Our team has well-established connections in other cities in Latin America and the United States that can serve as an alternative Civic Love launch location in the case of a political standstill in Bogota. We believe this is an unlikely outcome, as our traction in the city will allow us to be effective, barring an extreme event. 

Members of our team have affiliations with the MIT Media Lab, C-Innova and other research institutes.

• Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar
• Victoria Palacín
• Orestis Papakyriakopoulos
• Laura Perovich
• Leopold Meebaza
• Guadalupe Babio
• Rubez Chong

Civic Love is fueled by our team’s collective decades of experience in community-based research and civic engagement around the world. Some of our team members have designed and implemented community-based programs in technology and civic related areas in Latin America for the past ~10 years. Other team members have deep experience in Machine Learning in the context of socio-technical programs. 

Our enthusiasm for solving these problems brought us together three months ago to create Civic Love based on our in-depth knowledge and passion in working with communities. We are keen to harness the opportunity to use digital tools to create positive change, real world engagement, and enhancement of the social fabric in communities. 

Currently, the main organizations we are collaborating with are:

• MIT Media Lab (USA). The Media Lab is the main organization leading this challenge. The team was originally assembled there and the core creative teams are housed there. 
• C-Innova (Colombia). They are our main implementation partner. They are a grassroots organization who has been working in Colombia for the past 4 years implementing programs in urban, prep-urban, and rural areas. Their focus is on co-creation of technology, and socio-technical program interventions.
• IDN (International Development Innovation Network (USA). The IDIN network provides access to the innovators in the region, interested in community-based work. 

Currently, our revenue model relies on securing funding from local government and private institutions for Civic Love in-person gatherings. These are our customers, and our value proposition to them is ensuring citizen's active participation in local projects through thin participation (input into local initiatives, participation in surveys, etc), and thick participation (assistance to local government meetings, build-a-thins organized by us, etc). This funding, will support our cost structure, comprised mainly by maintenance and further development of our platform, staff, and in-person local interventions.

We will measure this participation through engagement in our platform, assistance to in-person gatherings, and citizens involvement with local initiatives and local organizations. Key activities such as voting on ideas for local programs, civic intervention gatherings, person-to-persona and person-to-organization matching, are tailored towards these impact measures. 

As our digital platform grows, we might consider socially-conscious ads and donations as a source of revenue, always based on what community needs and wants might be.  

Our plan is to start with small grants to further develop and improve our digital platform. Locally, we will apply for public and private funding in order to facilitate Civic Love in-person gatherings. Funding sources such as USAID, IADB, Knight Foundation, and Open Society are at the top of our list. 

In the long run, we are looking at following the model of open software communities such as R, Linux, and Ushahidi. By using an open 311 accessible models, we can exchange key services and data with local governments and receive funding from them to sustain our operation. 

We will provide opportunities for individuals to donate and as our platform grows, we might consider socially-conscious ads from vendors and partners who communities deem appropriate and beneficial. 

We decided to apply to Solve due to many factors. First, Solve has grown a large community of innovators and an ecosystem of support around them that will be fundamental for our idea to take off. If we are awarded, this will become the most important asset to our team, especially since our revenue model in the beginning is based on small funding coming from grants or opportunities for civic work. Also, this network will become an opportunity to implement Civic Love in other regions of the world and have immediate access to connections with local organizations, governments, etc. 

Second, we have been inspired by how diverse Solve's open-innovation model has become, and believe these values align with the spirit of our solution. As well as other collectives applying to Solve, we are about bringing social change and justice through sensible technology for communities with lived experienced of the problems.

Solve's membership in particular, holds an interesting group of organizations that we would like to collaborate with:

Implementing partners:

• Tecnológico de Monterrey
• Grupo Salinas
• Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Because our focus is initially in Latin America, we will be interested in partnering with organizations on all fronts in exploring how Civic Love can enhance their impact in society and achieve their goals. 

Technology partners:

• Twilio.org

Not only because of their technology, but also because of what the mission of their non-profit is, partnering with Twilio will be an achieved goal for us. Communication companies who are interested in expanding their mission towards social change are one of the main partners we are looking for. 

Academic partners:

• Paris Institute of Political Studies
• UCI School of Social Ecology

How the Civic Love model can be further enhanced by research, academic rigor, and theory is one of our biggest dreams. Being able to interact with these kinds of partners, will provide a theory-practice dimension to our solution that we are keen to expand.

In a more general sense, multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations, USAID, would be wonderful partners though their HQs or their regional offices. Moreover, Latin America focused organizations such as the IADB will add an extra element. 

The deployment of an efficient social search platform such as Civic love requires the creation and organization of a system of servers, databases, and deep learning algorithms. The system requires to be constantly fine-tuned, improved and adapted to ever-changing demands emerging from the day-by-day functioning of the platform. We will use this prize to out in place an infrastructure allowing us to properly deal with these elements. 

In addition, part of the proposal is the implementation of a hybrid deep recommendation system, ensuring a fair and diverse matching between the platform users. This means the design of an architecture with high privacy standards, and the implementation and tuning of algorithms in a way that respects people’s rights. These tasks require high expertise, state-of-the-art hardware and software resources, as well as a dedicated research scientist to cope with the issues. The AI Innovations Prize would be used towards investing in these directions, in order for the project to serve as a prototype of fair algorithmic implementations.