William Steele imagined a better way of communication beyond the chatter and noise of social media that vents anger but leads nowhere when it comes to solutions and collaboration.

He began to form the outlines of a civic media platform that could link citizens to their elected officials in discussing and analyzing issues. Steele’s wishes soared with ambition and with an idealism he wanted to apply to a new kind of online platform.

“I wanted to build this product for years but I didn’t have the skill set to do it on my own,” said Steele, who is a software and AI developer. “It was a pipedream.”

Luckily for Steele, who lives in Harlingen, he would come to have willing partners in one of his former professors at Kansas State University and a fellow high-tech entrepreneur who resides in Austin. Jorge Valenzuela is the professor and Jack Sawyer, like Steele, had started work on a similar sort of civic media platform. From their first meeting in Austin, Steele and Sawyer knew they were like minded and shared the same ethics and values in creating a new kind of platform.

Add Valenzuela as a wise mentor to the younger partners and the three together would form Represent, a civic media platform company that for now is housed at the eBridge Center in Brownsville. The latter is a startup incubator and entrepreneurial resource center and is ideal for a company like Represent that is under formation and showing promise. On May 25, a launch party was held at eBridge that was open to the general public as well as local elected officials who wanted to take a first look at the Represent platform.

“We want something that allows for elected leaders to foster a better connection to citizens,” Steele said.

Valenzuela describes it as “removing the noise” of social media and creating something purer that results in elected officials and their communities being more aligned and better informed.

Building A Pipeline

The concept is for Represent to be browser based versus being an application, or an app, to be downloaded as is the case with Facebook and Twitter.

After signing up on Represent, an account is created and the user can communicate with others on the platform along with elected officials who are similarly registered. From there, the intent is to create an orderly and efficient discussion of shared issues instead of random chaos. The programming architecture being created by the Represent partners leads to “topics of address” being created.

If a topic is about the widening of a busy thoroughfare, for example, users can offer their thoughts on the topic via posts that are seen by all participants. Each post would be like an individual item on a petition and voted upon for clarity and quality. The post receiving the most votes would be delivered to an elected official, like a mayor who would have his or her own Represent account. There would be a flexibility to see all posts behind the one chosen as being the best articulation of an issue, but the emphasis is on summarizing the issue effectively.

Sawyer calls it building “a pipeline” from citizens to elected officials without the insults and mean edge of what’s commonly found on social media. Users would be anonymously verified as being humans and not bots that have plagued many social apps. 

The goal is for a mayor and other local leaders to read quality posts from residents on important community issues and engage with them on those topics. The end result, hopefully, is more information shared and better policies and actions taken by a city commission or a county government board with the public’s viewpoint in mind. 

Steele believes Represent can work with municipal governments to provide this sort of dialogue and will be willing to pay for the services the platform can provide. It would be a primary method of generating revenues for the new company.

Lofty Goals

The goals of the Represent partners are lofty ones and they will start their project with Brownsville residents and their local governments.

Creating those partnerships with local governments is underway as Represent rolls out their platform. Beyond user comments and dialogue with elected officials, it is hoped the platform can lead to the creation of polls that can gauge the views and needs of local residents. The Represent partners are seeking to cut through the clutter of social media in doing their part to diminish misinformation and boost trust in democratic institutions. That’s a tall order these days, but the three partners are determined and committed to their emerging product.

“It’s not there for idle discussion,” Steele said of the Represent platform. “We want to facilitate a good dialogue and ask better questions.”