Problem

The University of Michigan, lead by Charlotte Cavaille contracted our team to create a Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR) web application. to create a minimum viable product in the form of a web application that would codify a novel survey technique, quadratic voting for survey research. Quadratic voting is a collective decision making mechanism that can capture the intensity of people’s preferences using a budget constraint, real or artificial. This allows participants to “buy” votes and spend them on survey items. A challenge was that Quadratic voting in a survey context had not yet been created as realized UI/UX.

Solution

Civicbase was created to respond directly to Cavaille, Chen and Van der Straeten's work. We scoped out and prioritized user requirements and stories with the product owner. We then iteratively developed the application using agile sprints to deliver the MVP within a 8 week period, working closely with the product owner who tested and provided feedback.

Our QVSR UI solution uses a radial design which expands and contracts based on voting intensity for a survey item.
A dynamic credit bar allows users to monitor their overall credit use.
Surveys can be created, edited and deployed by users.
Surveys are generated as a URL link, and are able to be shared online to survey participants.
Likert surveys can also be created and deployed.
Open source Github repository.

Impact

Initially, experiments comparing QVSR to Likert scale were conducted by Cavaille within the university.
Additionally, we have deployed the application for a council ward in Brisbane, Australia, where it was being used to measure citizen preferences in relation to local policies and participatory budgeting initiatives. This study looked at QVSR vs Likert in it's ability to effectively elicit citizen preferences.
I presented Civicbase at the The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021 for the Workshop: AI for Credible Elections: A Call to Action.
"Civicbase: An open source platform for deploying Quadratic
Voting for Survey Research" has been published in the Summer 2023 edition of AI Magazine.

Responsibilities

Agile project management using JIRA
UI/UX design of the web application in Figma
Stakeholder engagement
Workshop presenter
Primary paper writer for AI magazine.

Civicbase: Open source web application for Quadratic Voting for Survey Research.