#Problem Description

What are we trying to achieve:

We are team CityConnect, and we are trying to connect citizens to their local government with an easy-to-use app where city documents can be searched, users can ask questions and received written responses, and users can share documents via social media easily to better communicate with others about local government.

Shortcomings of the current system

Currently most of the City of Campbell General Plan is in a single PDF document which is difficult for citizens to search for specific information. When the General Plan is updated, community involvement and input is critical, and the City wants to create an app (web and/or mobile) that will allow it to easy share documents associated with the update process, notify users that updated information has become available, show them a calendar of upcoming events, allow them to ask questions of the City as they related to a specific document or the process, and share information via the user’s social media subscriptions.

Why are we doing this

As a General Plan is the considered amongst the most critical documents used by local governments, and has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, a specific application to engage the community in the process would be extremely attractive to all cities doing an update to their General Plan, both in California, and across the nation.

Possible outreach and planned outcomes of the project

Our app would use elasticsearch to process natural-language queries so that citizens can find the specific information they are looking for without scanning a large document. The additional goal is to also include all City of Campbell government information in an easy to access format on web and mobile devices to better connect with the younger demographic of campbell and other cities.

For each city-generated document, we plan to integrate a Q&A tool where users can easily ask questions on parts of the document they are unclear and get an email response with a written by a knowledgeable city employee. We also plan to implement a social media share button where users can share city documents they find important on twitter, Facebook, and other sites.

We hope this app is a model for other cities around the country to better involve citizens in their local government and create better, more engaged communities.