Direct democracy—that libertarian pipedream—has entered the political scene at Harvard College. Since 1982, the undergraduate student body has been led by a group of 54 elected representatives known as the Undergraduate Council (UC). The Council’s responsibilities include representing students from each of the College’s first-year dorms and upperclassmen residential houses and interfacing with University administrators on student issues. There is, however, a new app that is looking to radically change the ways in which students make their voices heard on the issues that affect them most. Crimson OpenGov, available on IOS, Android, and the web, promises students an “unprecedented” opportunity to voice their ideas, opinions, and concerns directly to Harvard administrators.
How exactly does the app work? Does it live up to the hype? The Independent spoke with Harvard student and man behind the app Will McConnell ’22 to get the scoop.
According to McConnell, the app at its most basic is “a way for students to connect with administrators, make their voices heard, and be the change they want to see on campus.” The user interface for Crimson OpenGov is relatively simple, consisting of three sections, each of which contains multiple poll questions. At the top are “Timely” polls set to expire in a few weeks. Below those are “Permanent” polls posing general questions such as, “What ideas do you have to improve Harvard?” Students also have the opportunity to suggest questions of their own. Finally, at the bottom are “Finished” polls for which voting has concluded.
When a user taps on an active poll, they are taken to a new tab that expands upon the polling question and offers a list of responses. A comment box allows users to list their own responses if they do not agree with those already listed. Voting on a given response is as simple as tapping “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Unsure/Neutral.” The goal, McConnell says, is to “have the community on the app coalesce around the most supported ideas to bring the student voice together into something administrators can act on.”
A driving idea behind the project is self-governance, particularly that mediated by technology. “Historically, when people try to bring democratic principles or ideals to bear, that’s looked like a representative system,” says McConnell. “There are many reasons for that, but one of them is definitely that it’s impractical, or at least was impractical, to get a lot of people together to make decisions as a group.”
But to McConnell and supporters of Crimson OpenGov, such limitations might be a thing of the past. With the emergence of newer, safer, and faster technology, people should be able to voice their opinions at the touch of a button. As McConnell puts it, “Part of the idea behind this is seeing how we can use technologies to enhance democracy and the possibilities for group decision-making.” While such a tool could theoretically make the current representative system obsolete in the future, McConnell stated that he views the project as being “augmentary” to the existing system, not necessarily a replacement.
Kirkland House UC Representative Arjun Bhattarai ’24 shares McConnell’s hope that the app will facilitate interactions between students, the UC, and the administration. He says the UC currently lacks, “a medium to understand the collective and immediate inconveniences affecting student well-being at campus. In comes Crimson OpenGov, which could potentially act as a medium to channel the different voices of students in one place.”
Advances in communication technology allow for instantaneous feedback, but they also pose their own unique challenges, not least of which is security. According to app developer Noah Rubin, the team is currently working on a number of measures to ensure users’ safety and anonymity. “One thing is you have to be a Harvard student, you have to verify with your Harvard email address in order to get into the app at all,” he says. Additionally, all of the data on the app’s server is encrypted, “meaning that if a hacker were to hack into the database, they wouldn’t actually know who did what.”
In addition to these more technical difficulties, there is the age-old issue of political participation. “The political culture here is very disengaged, disillusioned, and apathetic,” says McConnell, “Those are durable elements of the culture here that are not going to disappear in one day with a new app. But part of the project’s goal is to build a more engaged culture over time.” He says the UC Student Body President Michael Cheng ’22 has been working to ensure that administrators respond swiftly to the student opinions shared in the polls. McConnell hopes that, in time, students will take note of the impact their voices have via the app and conclude that they can make concrete differences “with very little time investment.”
The low-commitment nature of the app makes for ease of use, but some are concerned that the polls taken on the app and the data garnered from them will not be enough to sway administrators. Kirkland UC Representative Ivor Zimmerman ’23 is among those skeptical of the app’s effectiveness. “As a concept I really like it,” he says. “Getting people to engage in any way with the UC is a really good step toward it being legitimized and building back up the trust that it needs to have from the student body.” In his eyes, however, there have been flaws in the app’s implementation. He says, “The problem is it’s just not formatted enough, it’s not structured enough to pull any useful things out of there without being very biased.” Consequently, he thinks the poll results are difficult to take seriously. Instead, he proposes building upon and improving the UC’s referendum system which, he claims, provides a more robust and trustworthy dataset.
Zimmerman and Bhattarai agree that for the tool to have any use, more students and administrators need to buy in. At the time of this article, the most voted upon polls on the app have around 170 votes, 30 votes less than the 200 required to place a referendum on the UC ballot. Time will tell whether Crimson OpenGov manages to become an everyday part of campus culture, but McConnell remains optimistic about the project’s prospects. “In a year’s time, I would like for most students to have heard of the app and have a significant chunk of those students recognize that, by participating in the app for even five minutes a month, they can actually enact change on campus,” he says. However, he recognizes that such a feat will require a collective mindset shift in order for the student body to believe that “we actually run this campus or at least have a very serious seat at the table in this community.”
For readers who would like to check out the app, it is available as “Crimson OpenGov” on IOS, Android, and on the web.