A University of Northern B.C. student wants to help shrink the gap between politicians and the people they represent.
On Wednesday, PhD candidate Geoff de Ruiter launched an Apple- and Android-friendly application designed to offer Canadians an easy communication link to their elected representatives.
The app, called Democracy Link, helps users send personalized emails or place phone calls to federal, provincial and municipal leaders with a minimum of clicks. The idea behind it being that a healthy democracy requires communication and citizen engagement, said de Ruiter.
"People need to really make the effort to engage in politics because when you don't and you complain, you really have nothing to complain about. It's a negative cycle that people get themselves in," said de Ruiter. "And until people are feeling empowered enough to get themselves into politics, they'll continue to be dissatisfied and disheartened with the political process."
The app spawned six months ago after a session of reading comments on an online National Post story, said de Ruiter.
"There's absolutely no political implication with posting on a news article comment feed," he said. "And I thought, 'It has to be this simple for someone to contact their elected representative.' The reason why people like the comment section is it's so easy - you're always signed in and you're always ready to post."
In the initial set up, users can input their name, address and additional information such as their occupation and employer. Then they can choose their federal and provincial representatives and input their municipal officials. Unlike the federal and provincial reps, whose information comes pre-loaded, users have to manually input phone numbers and email addresses for local government leaders.
"It's unfortunate, but that is one of the limitations that we came to with the app," de Ruiter said. "I wanted to... because municipal governance is so important versus provincial and federal. It's almost more important to your average, every day life to have an engaged citizenry within your municipality or city."
Afterwards, it's two clicks to place a phone call or three (aside from the actual message) to fire off an email.
Unlike many online comment sections, Democracy Link doesn't allow for anonymous messages, which de Ruiter said is the only way to be effective.
"For any amount of political clout, that has to be personalized," he said. "And I have provided multiple ways to show who you are, what you do, what you've learned and where you live."
Though the app is not for profit, de Ruiter is crowd funding to pay for the work of the two UNBC undergraduate computer science students for their coding work. Information can be found at democracylink.ca.
