Making Democracy Doable

You've got a lot of experience in technology companies.

How did that help you think about what was possible?

I think working in tech has taught me three things.

One, how to make information usable.

Two, that you have to give people control.

And then three, that you can be ambitious about what we can build.

So on that first point, making information usable across my career, I've worked in different industries.

I've worked in different functions like data science, analytics, monetization.

And the through line in all of that was you can have the best data in the world, lots of interesting pieces of information, but if somebody can't understand it and digest it and it's not accessible, it really doesn't matter.

So it has to be usable.

The second thing is the giving people control piece, different languages, letting them choose how they receive answers and levels of detail and those explanations and allowing it to meet the user where they're at.

And then lastly, working across tech, there's just an enormous amount of talent and resources being poured into making consumer experiences easier.

And my goal is to bring that level of attention to civic tech and to civic life.

I don't think we need to accept that voters have to stay overwhelmed and confused.

I think we can bring that level of innovation that's in the tech world over to the civic tech world.

That's what I'd like to do.

And for those who are listening and say, oh, I want to check this out, it's votemateus.org, right? And as sort of the opening website.

Yeah, that's our company page.

And then you can get to the app from there.

If you want to go straight to the app, it's votemate.io and that'll get you

there.

We'll have all this in the show notes too, of course.