After changing our "How might we" question from "how might we get more people to vote?" to "How might we encourage more of our local community to be politically involved?", we set out with five different research methods to find out all that we can about the subject. The research methods we decided to go with are: personas, fly on the wall observations, secondary research, literary reviews, and cognitive mapping and walkthroughs.
When creating personas, tried to create a diverse group of people where most ideas are represented. We did this by diversifying age, race, and gender. Each persona had something to bring to the table when it comes to political involvement. I was in charge of creating personas that represented college age students. I made one that is already involved, and another who is not involved. The one that is involved is a political science major who is involved wants to join student government and deeply cares about being against corruption in politics. The other is computer science major who is stressed about the environment he is in. He wishes to be more involved but just doesn't have the time. He wishes he knew small things he could do during his busy schedule to get more involved.
When doing my literary reviews, I centralized my findings around easy less time consuming ways to get people involved with politics. I read blogs and articles talking about just that. The simple ways I found that got people involved is by campaigning for their politician (either by making calls, donating, or collecting polling data), volunteering for non profit organizations that focus on issues that you specifically care about, and volunteering for non partisan voter registration drive. The other ways I found that people could get involved were a little more time consuming and are specifically for the people who want to make politics their career. I also found an article talking about people creating their own organizations centered around an issue they cared about and making a real impact on their community.