Zimmedari: Instilling Social Responsibility to Combat Challenges

Abstract

Local community problems whilst prevalent in every society, seldom get media attention. People too, do not have the time or inclination to report such daily challenges owing to tedious and complex procedures and lack of faith in the governing bodies. All these factors contribute to such challenges remaining under the radar; undetected, unnoticed and hence unsolved. The application’s primary aim is to influence social change. Users will be able to share what they feel is important by posting with the use of (at least one) application-specific hashtag. These hashtags will in turn help categorize this information in relevant areas of interest. These broadly include the following: • Local community challenges relating to but not limited to civic infrastructure maintenance such as burnt out transformers, local road maintenance, waste disposal • Education related issues concerning the quality of education imparted as well as the resources provided to educate our young minds • Volunteer work opportunities. Our society needs more people investing their time rather than money to help bring about positive change. • Health and Security concerns. • Environmental concerns. • Lost and found items. • Social Campaigns, where users will be able to promote their social causes, say a donation drive to help the underprivileged, or a tree-plantation drive to promote being more eco-friendly, or a blood donation drive to help fellow citizens in need, or any cause that promotes awareness and brings about positive change. The users will be able to see the ‘feed’ of their community. For an accountability mechanism fellow users will be able to endorse/reject posts and also post progress reports about the matter, where relevant. Obscene posts/comments can be reported and will be moderated. The social network takes a gamified approach to problem solving incorporating a scoring model based on the number of problems reported and solved by a citizen, resulting in community and citizen standings to keep things more challenging and interesting, and leading the way to a better, more responsible community. In essence the aim of this application is to promote awareness at the grass root level to empower people to bring about positive social change.