Accelerator | Unbundle Policing: Reimagine Public Safety Challenge

Vngle

Team Leader

Blake Stoner

Solution Name

Vngle

One-line solution summary:

Vngle is a blockchain-based grassroots news network combating various angles of misinformation & underrepresentation in cities.

What specific problem are you solving?

We're solving how to best catalyze civic engagement in marginalized areas to combat misinformation and underrepresentation across municipalities through creating real-time verified grassroots news networks. We see the greatest danger to public safety is a municipality's inability to easily gather and disseminate authenticated information that represents their entire constituency. This is especially the case in communities away from metropolitan hubs that live in “news deserts” and suffer from old ineffective communication technology that can’t properly segment outreach by geolocation.

These news deserts are disproportionately leaving communities ill-represented and informed. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. alone lost over 2,100 local outlets, leading to over 64% of counties, millions of people, having little to no access to daily original news. News deserts deprive communities of an essential institution for highlighting local concerns that encourage civic engagement. These information vacuums are where misinformation grows the most and is only magnified by social media channels acting as echo chambers. On top of this, on average ONLY 17% of local news communities receive is actually original and relevant to them, (since hedge funds own over 50% of US newspapers, and local broadcast is controlled by a small handful of conglomerates).

Pitch your solution.

A platform for communities to communicate with civic leaders and grassroots organizations to submit health and safety issues at a low cost, through a verifiable solution, independent of social media.

Vngle is a decentralized blockchain-based grassroots news network that’s training local citizens with HD smartphones to bring verifiable nonpartisan video-based coverage to underrepresented communities. We tackle news deserts by deploying a creator-economy neighborhood watch platform that equips locals with the skills needed to serve as reporters & editors for the areas they live in. In return, we are bringing real-time hyper-local insights to municipalities all verified by forensic metadata through public ledger technology.

Our aim is to enable public safety departments and municipal operations as a whole to operate quicker by easily accessing and disseminating verified information from any device or location. This is a local information ecosystem that makes it easy to share authenticated insights across jurisdictions.

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.

We're Working in the City of College Park and Union City, Georgia and have built trust with both Mayor & Council + Public Safety.

Through this work, we also landed partnerships with both local businesses and elected officials in College Park and beyond it. In fact, our work caught the attention of the Chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners (College Park is in Fulton County), who wants to work with us to grow our grassroots coverage to underrepresented areas across Atlanta and the other 14 cities that encompass the county.

Also, state officials really trust us and want to see our coverage expand to their districts. One State Senator felt Georgia needs nonpartisan coverage so much, he gave us his office at the Capitol to use as a base. Another State Senate candidate exclusively requested Vngle to broadcast their press conference.

***Also, the submitted app link is only a prototype and will be revamped.