My own project (https://plantogether.city) hopes to help make cities better from an urban planning perspective by enabling two things:
1. Giving people a voice. People don't feel a sense of belonging because they a single individual amongst thousands/millions. Being able to discuss things directly on a map with other citizens is empowering.
2. Serving as a spatial knowledge base. Allows users to collaboratively catalog the best, worst, most interesting etc. parts and elements. For example all items tagged with cycling in Waterloo (https://plantogether.city/tag/cycling?area_id=3).
Having more organized information and discussions could go a long way in improving decision making.
I had an idea for a similar project last year. I thought it could perform a few functions:
1. Help compile a list of local issues
2. Empower people to help fix those issues (recognizing the different people can help out in different ways on the same issue)
3. Allow groups to highlight their contributions (e.g. local Libertarian party or Lions club or whoever can highlight X number of closed issues in 2020)
This direct action platform would certainly be susceptible to trolling and abuse but it also would directly provide the answers to the OP's question.
(One other hope would be that, if this caught on, maybe political campaigns could redirect some of their ad spend to helping fix these issues as that would allow them to say, "We did this".)
1. Giving people a voice. People don't feel a sense of belonging because they a single individual amongst thousands/millions. Being able to discuss things directly on a map with other citizens is empowering.
2. Serving as a spatial knowledge base. Allows users to collaboratively catalog the best, worst, most interesting etc. parts and elements. For example all items tagged with cycling in Waterloo (https://plantogether.city/tag/cycling?area_id=3).
Having more organized information and discussions could go a long way in improving decision making.