(for more details on these features click the respective key terms)

General Features

• Centralized Resources – Much like a department store, digiciti.org will be a “one-stop shop” solution by bringing together a number of great political action resources spread out across the web.
• Socialize – All the resources of the site have social networking components to help encourage interaction.
• Gamification – Using the site gets you clout social clout through a deep achievement system that is tied to a creative game in which users build their own custom city and society.  The Honor Badge system for achievements gives users fancy icons displayed on their profile and alongside much of their site activities.  based on accumulated points and achievements in various categories of site participation users can also play the DigiCitiBuilder game.
• Safe – Site interactions are moderated to be civilized and respectful while avoiding removal of content whenever possible in efforts to protect free speech.  Furthermore, since this site is designed specifically for political deliberation, one doesn’t have to worry about upsetting their friend or professional social networks with discussion of potentially controversial issues.
• Privacy – Users can keep virtually all of their content between a select group of people or share it with the world to try and inspire broad change.

Features

• Identity Discovery – Answer a questionnaire designed by experts in politics to help you decide where you stand on issues and what political affiliations you would probably prefer.  This is part of account creation and can be used to help users find people of like minded or opposing views.
• “The Counterweight” – A section of the site specifically devoted to combating the problem of political polarization in the US.  It uses the account creation questionnaires to show users popular content from other users with opposing points of view.  The first step to repairing relations is to try and understand where other people are coming from.
• “Open-Source Legislation” – With all of the collaboration tools currently at our disposal in society, why leave lawmaking in the hands of a few representatives.  Tap into the vast expertise of our society and have the public send our leaders a clear message about what we want by writing laws ourselves and collaboratively editing legislative text.  Great tech innovations have come from open-sourced projects, there is no reason we can’t have great social innovations benefit from a similar model of public contribution.
• Wiki – Tap into the knowledge base of our population to share definitions of political jargon, history, and structural information about our system of governance such as who local officials are and what they do.
• User Hub – A log in page with custom selected widgets for getting a quick snapshot of preferred site content.
• Debate – Robust debate tools designed for political topics will help users discover the truth about many issues and learn about the strongest arguments made for the most pressing matters of our time.
• Academics – A set of resources for academics, students, teachers, and researchers, who can network and help their ideas truly impact movements.
• Petition – Tie your debates, posts, calendar events, and more to petitions that help influence leadership.
• Event Calendars – Create and share events with peers or the public.  A political organizers dream.  Find events based on category filters.
• Legislative Info – Easy access to politician voting records, and legislative texts from the past and present.
• Politician Profiles – Politician profiles are made with public information but if they actively participate in the site their profile can be a great tool for interacting with them.
• Interest Group Profiles – Interest groups wield great power in our society, many of them fight for in defense of important public rights and some are viewed as dangerous to the public interest.  Their unique profiles gives us a look at their background, mission, and helps us to decide whether or not to support their cause.
• Stats – This section reveals analysis of broad activities on the site, without disclosing any private user info, to help us make interesting discoveries about the nature of online political interaction as it evolves.
• News – Ideally, Digital Citizen will be able to form partnerships with all the major news organizations and help consolidate political news features into the site so that the networking, debate, calendar, and petition features can all be enhanced by ties to info from respected news sources.
• Agencies – Government agencies are not well know enough in our society yet their role is incredibly powerful.  This section offers a collection of public info about government agencies but aspires to have them use their own profiles to increase agency transparency.
• Mobile – A mobile app will be developed to help users access all of these features even when they cannot access a computer.
• Voter Resources – Centralization of voter registration and perhaps even online voting resources can be offered if digiciti.org is able to form long term partnerships with government.

To learn more or support the project, email digiciti@outlook.com, follow this blog, and share this site via your choice social media methods.