Representative dashboard
This guide is for elected representatives who have been approved on CivicOS. Your dashboard is where you see what citizens in your constituency are saying, respond publicly, and track how you're being held to account.
Getting your representative badge
Representatives don't self-onboard as reps directly. The flow is:
- Sign up with account type = Representative (see Create an account).
- Fill in your application: full name, title, position, constituency, community, and any proof URLs (ID card, official directory listing, etc.).
- A platform admin reviews your application. Outcomes:
- Approved — your rep profile goes live, citizens can follow you.
- Needs changes — you get a note explaining what's missing; you can edit and resubmit.
- Rejected — with a reason. If you disagree, contact platform admins.
While pending, you can still use the platform as a citizen.
Your representative page
Once approved, you have a public representative page tied to your constituency and community. It shows:
- Your title, position, party (optional), and photo.
- Bio — free-form.
- Contact — official email, phone, and website (all optional but strongly encouraged).
- Follower count — citizens who chose to follow you.
- Response rate — how often you post an official response on content you're tagged in. This is a public accountability metric.
- A comment thread where citizens post publicly on your page.
Keep your bio and contact info fresh — a stale page reads as disengaged. Any admin in your community can also edit your profile.
Announcements — speaking to your constituents
Everything else on this page is you replying to something a citizen started. Announcements are the one place you raise something yourself.
They appear on your public page, and publishing notifies everyone following you.
To post one:
- Open your own representative page. You will see an Announcements section with a New announcement button — it appears only on your own page.
- Write a title and body, then Save draft. Saving does not publish anything and nobody is notified.
- When you are ready, click Publish to followers.
Three things to know:
- A draft is private. Nobody sees it until you publish — not citizens, not other representatives, not admins.
- Published words cannot be edited. Your constituents were notified about specific words; quietly changing them afterwards would make a public statement into something nobody can rely on having read. If you need to correct something, archive it and publish a new one.
- Archiving is not deleting. It takes the announcement off your public page, but the record that you made the statement remains. Only an unpublished draft can be deleted outright.
Where it goes. A published announcement reaches your constituents three ways: everyone following you is notified, it appears in the Discover feed for your community, and it is findable in search. Drafts and archived announcements appear in none of those.
People can reply. Each published announcement has its own thread, so a constituent answering this announcement is not posting into a general discussion about something else. Your own replies there carry the official response badge, the same as on issues and petitions. Replies are moderated like any other comment, and your announcement can be reported.
Only you can post as you. Not another representative, not a platform admin. The profile is linked to your account when your application is approved, and that link is what the check is against — so nobody can put words in your mouth.
If your profile was created by a platform admin rather than by your own approved application, it starts unclaimed — it isn't tied to any account yet, and publishing will tell you so. Ask a platform admin to link it to your account. Until they do, you can't post announcements or open a constituency office.
Your constituency office
Everything an organization can do on CivicOS, you can do too — through your constituency office. Open My office in the sidebar and create it once; it takes a click.
The office is the entity your constituents see behind what you publish ("Office of Senator Ada Okafor"), and it gives you:
- Campaigns — raise money for something your constituency needs. Donations settle to your own account, not to CivicOS.
- Projects — publish what you're delivering, with budgets and progress updates.
- Consultations — put a question to your constituents and collect structured responses.
- Announcements from the office — distinct from the personal announcements on your profile above.
Before your office can take money
Creating the office lets you draft. It does not let you collect anything. Your office starts unverified with no payout account, exactly as a newly registered organization does. Before a campaign can accept a single naira:
- A platform admin verifies your office.
- You connect a payout account.
- Your campaign passes review.
One thing differs from an organization, and only one: an NGO proves it exists by its registration number, and an elected office has no such entry in any company register. In its place, your office must be linked to your claimed representative profile — a platform admin has confirmed that you are the person holding the seat. Every other requirement is identical. Raising money from your own constituents is held to at least the standard an NGO is held to, not a lower one.
Reading what citizens are saying
Three feeds are relevant to you:
- Your constituency feed — issues and petitions in the community you're tied to. Sort by upvotes to see what's rising.
- Comments on your page — the public wall citizens post to.
- Your notifications — new comments, new followers, and issues that admins have specifically flagged for your attention.
Responding officially
An official response is a comment posted by a representative, government admin, NGO, moderator, or platform admin. The system labels it so citizens can distinguish your voice from another citizen posting on your page.
How to respond:
- Open the issue, petition, or your rep page's comment thread.
- Write a comment as you normally would.
- Post it.
The comment is automatically flagged isOfficialResponse: true because
of your role — you don't need to toggle anything.
When you post an official response on your rep page, every follower gets a notification. Ordinary comments from other citizens on your page don't fan out — only official ones do.
Answering issues
Citizens will file issues in your constituency. You can:
- Comment to acknowledge, ask for detail, or explain the situation.
- Change status — if you're also a
GOVERNMENT_ADMIN, you can move the issue through the lifecycle (OPEN→UNDER_REVIEW→IN_PROGRESS→RESOLVED/CLOSED). - Ping the right org — a platform admin or org admin can assign the issue to the body responsible for handling it.
Answering petitions
Petitions are structured asks. Your options:
- Comment publicly to state your position — for, against, needs refinement, etc.
- Post a milestone response when a petition crosses 25 %, 50 %, or 100 %. Citizens are already getting a milestone notification; your reply is the follow-up they're expecting.
Response rate
Every representative has a response rate metric visible on their public profile. It's the share of issues (in your community) that received either an official comment from you or a public progress update from an assigned organization.
This metric is not currently computed. The field exists and shows 0% on every profile. Nothing in the platform updates it yet, so it should not be read as a signal about any representative.
Etiquette
- Answer, don't campaign. Your rep page isn't a campaign channel — it's a public accountability venue. Save the campaigning for elsewhere.
- Be specific. "We're looking into it" ages badly. "Team dispatched to Junction 4 at 9 AM, ETA 45 minutes" ages well.
- Never delete a hard question. Comment on it. Deleted questions hurt trust more than any answer ever could.
- Correct the record publicly. If you were wrong about something, say so in a follow-up comment. The audit trail is public anyway.
Related: Notifications →