Doing startups for the money is not a great idea. Perhaps doing startups to be remembered or become famous is a better motive. Perhaps not. A better motive still would be a desire to change the world.

We believe that the only good reason to do a startup is because you really truly believe in some thing. A vision of how things should work. How the world should run. And you don’t see anyone around you creating that vision, so you set out to build it yourself.

At SocialCops, we believe in the power of citizen voice. We think that if citizens are given the right tools and their voice is channeled in the right manner, we can create ideal communities. We believe that citizen reports are a powerful resource to different stakeholders in the community – councils, NGOs and corporates. And yet, this powerful citizen voice is not being harnessed to its potential. And we think that if this citizen voice is used as a resource– we can change the very basis of how communities function.  And change the world in the process.

Through the course of the SocialCops pilot, we’re measuring ourselves by three questions:

Creating Impact

For us, creating impact is about being able to make citizen reports more than a mere complaint. Instead, we want to make it a Resource. During our pilot, we’re applying some interesting gamification concepts to the public system to try and understand how to make every citizen report a resource for community stakeholders.

Creating Community

Are we engaging citizens the right way? Are we creating a community driven effort? We firmly believe that people are “Smart, Intelligent and DO CARE.” Dave Meslin sums up our believes regarding citizenry pretty accurately in his TED Talk – The Antidote to Apathy. And the one driving factor in all the decisions made in the company would be engage citizens to create a powerful voice.

Creating Solutions

And now we talk about problems – let’s start off with civic issues like uncollected garbage, potholes, broken streetlights, open defecation. In India, 40% of all municipal waste goes uncollected leading to diseases like cholera and typhoid. 3 people DIE every minute because of accidents caused by Bad Roads. These are simple, solvable problems. We believe that by using simple technology and community engagement, we can create a long-lasting solution. We can ensure garbage is picked up on time and we can minimize the number of potholes. A community centric- solution.

We believe that the right attitude towards learning, re-iterating and creating can help us solve the problem we set out to achieve. Do follow our pilot on #socialcopspilot.

We’d like to say that we aren’t changing the system, we’re hacking it instead.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.