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When no one in Nick Gaines’ UC Berkeley freshman political science class could answer the question “Who is your state senator?,” he tuned in, dropped out and started GovHub with co-founder Adam Becker. Here, Becker shares more about their pursuit of the American dream and how they want to help citizens better engage with their elected officials.
Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.
GovHub provides a personalized platform for citizens to learn about and interact with their officials in each level of government.
What problems does GovHub solve?
For government officials:
- Lack of name recognition
- Antiquated, costly public opinion polls
- Inefficient methods for communicating with their constituents
For citizens:
- Hard to actually find who represents you in each level of government (to find out who my city councilperson is, I have to click through about ten pages on my city's website, including a 2mb PDF file)
- Once you know who represents you, no good way to see what they're doing in office
- Communication with representatives often feels futile and is hard to get a personalized response from
What are its key features?
- Enter your address and see the officials that represent you at each level of government.
- See their profiles, voting records, social media updates.
- Interact with them on our discussion board, which uses crowdsourced moderation to determine the issues that are most important to an official's constituents. (We have Kriss Worthington from the Berkeley City Council doing our first Q+A on April 12th.)
…and some really neat things planned for the future.
What are the costs, pricing plans?
GovHub will always be free for its users. In the future we plan to charge government officials (and candidates) for the different services that can connect them to their constituents.