While this is an idea that could be somewhat useful, as far as I can tell, it omits the ability to provide any significant nuance or discussion on a given matter. So much of substance happens through discussion and deliberation, not through clicking buttons.

How many people want to sign up to actually receive more spam?

Out of curiosity I registered. Not much to see but to participate even in a mundate survey (e.g. Do you know you can get a Covid Booster here?) you need to verify your identity with ID.me. A very intrusive process where one has to share date of birth, phone number and even upload Identification documents. No thanks.

@bkengland Absolutely! With CivicBell we hope to promote productive discussion and discourse, which is why all of our posts can involve comment boards where real residents can deliberate, ask questions and discuss opinions and facts. This unstructured input is complemented with surveys for general sentiment analysis for structured input - basically up to the official how best to garner sentiment depending on the topic. We believe both have a use case.

@Bernie Brightman Very good point. No one does! We definitely don’t. With CivicBell we hope to avoid the need of signing up for 50+ newsletters since it’s all there in one feed for you to read whenever YOU want!

@SRB Appreciate sharing your initial thoughts. Keep in mind this is the pilot launch so engagement will continue to increase and improve. It is up to the government officials what information they would like to distribute and what surveys/discussions are most helpful for them to do their job. Post-election season we expect much more productive engagement options to be available. Thank you for bearing with us as we work out the kinks. As for ID.me, the reasons we use them is (1) they are trusted by multiple government entities, (2) as CivicBell, we do not have access to any of these identification documents and (3) a large portion of Californians already have accounts.