UC Berkeley Students Are Using Tech To Innovate Democratic Processes

The Building Bridges course encourages students to think like entrepreneurs and "see that technology can be used for good.”  

For first-year student Shruti Sahoo, UC Berkeley’s campus seemed to sport a divide: on one side, highly politically engaged students, and on the other, those focused on being part of the cutting edge of technological innovation. 

She and 32 other students spent this past spring in a course dedicated to making explicit how the two might connect: Building Bridges Between Democracy and Technology for a Better Society. Part of the Challenge Lab series run by the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET), the course invites students to brainstorm, develop and pitch web-based platforms with the potential to effect positive social and political change at the broadest scale possible.

The course was co-developed by Kirk Bansak, a Berkeley political science professor and Gert Christen, who helped lead former San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s public sector innovation lab. Christen now teaches entrepreneurship to Berkeley students, focusing on connecting them with opportunities and current developments in nearby Silicon Valley.

He cites the “tech desert” that characterizes much of government and the U.S. public sector as not only a source of inefficiencies, but also a likely deterrent to younger generations of tech savvy employees. In his view, the solutions proposed by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stand to push the country still further in the wrong direction; the visual of tech moguls pointedly seated in front of incoming cabinet members at President Trump’s inauguration deeply dismayed him.

“I come from the technology industry, but I’ve strongly felt that us techies, we haven’t always used technology for the best purposes,” Christen said. “In my small way, I’m trying to do something by taking 33 people at a time, and for four months helping them to see that technology can be used for good.”  

He and Bansak designed the course to reflect its entrepreneurial bent: Students organized themselves into teams based on mutual interest, administered surveys and other research methods to assess the problem their products would directly solve, learned how to build a pitch deck, and presented their work to a panel of judges in final pitch sessions worth 50% of their grade. The highest-rated presenting team would go on to compete in the Collider Cup, an event hosted every semester by SCET in which top student teams present their ideas to both professors and industry representatives.

The winning team from the course this semester was SimpleGov. The problem it tackled was no small matter: perceived transparency and accountability — or a lack thereof — amongst elected officials and a resultant low trust in government among voters. In response, the team members proposed a platform that would connect publicly available legislative data, or bills passed, with political donations. 

I’m trying to do something by taking 33 people at a time, and for four months helping them to see that technology can be used for good.

Gert Christen

Planning to start with a focus on California politicians, the team’s goal is to first track and then eventually develop a predictive tool that would measure the relationship between money received and voting track record. The team received positive feedback from consultants at both The New York Times and Business Insider.

Voted MVP by her SimpleGov teammates, economics and political science major Kiara Shriqui learned about the “Building Bridges” course after studying data algorithms and public policy with Professor Bansak. “I like when the technological and data side meet the political science side. I think it makes a lot of sense to have more emphasis put on those intersections,” she said. “In political science, we are taught some empirical methods of analysis — I think we need more initiatives like this because there’s a big gap.” 

A senior, Shriqui plans to move to New York City after graduation to work as a paralegal for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and eventually go to law school. She hopes to continue the project pending funding, citing its relatively low operating costs and the potential to recruit technical support from Berkeley as well as the interest expressed by journalistic organizations her team has been in conversation with. Campus interest has been high, with the team winning the People’s Choice Award by the audience at this year’s Collider Cup.

In addition to SimpleGov, other student teams included Demex and Situation Room. Students from Demex pitched a social media platform modeled on dating apps that would encourage people from different political persuasions to enter into conversation on a range of topics, giving a different potential meaning to “swiping right.”

Situation Room, which Sahoo was a part of, envisioned a digital space where political activists interact with journalists. Designed as an encrypted platform with several levels of privacy to choose from, it would emphasize keeping identities and information protected in response to heightened fears concerning the risks both groups currently face. The team was awarded the Social Impact award by the panel of judges.

The course was funded by the Yardi Foundation as part of the Berkeley Discovery Initiative, which offers support at the conceptual and funding level to campus research initiatives with the aim of connecting learning opportunities and future pathways for undergraduates. Its work with the Yardi Scholarship reflects a shared goal of bringing students across disciplines together — in this case, engineers and social scientists — to solve big problems.

Commenting on its significance, Leslie Rae Harlson, the Discovery Initiative’s executive director, said she hopes to see more innovative cross-departmental collaborations, which help expose students to perspectives and skill sets outside their majors. 

“I was blown away by the student presentations,” said Harlson. “I loved hearing how the engineers and business students had their eyes opened to the theory and also practice of political science principles and the history of democracy.”

After a successful course launch, Christen and Bansak are already looking ahead to a second iteration of the course next year. They are eager to see what incoming course enrollees can do to “help move the needle,” as Christen puts it, on technological innovations serving the public good.