Power of 32 is a regional visioning initiative that has involved tens of thousands of people across 32 counties in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in creating a shared vision for the region’s future.

When Power of 32 contacted Bearded, they had already done a considerable amount of information gathering through in-person meetings and written surveys all over the 32-county region. They knew that they wanted to reach a wider audience through the web, but asked Bearded to propose an approach. What resulted was the Power of 32 Civic Engagement application. Built on the Ruby on Rails framework as a custom web application, the Power of 32 app allows users to participate in meaningful discussions and a considered decision-making process with others throughout the region.

The core of the app is a system for collaborative decision-making, which consists of goals, challenges to the goals, and options to overcome the challenges. Users can create any of these parts, and rate them on importance, difficulty, and effectiveness. This allows the collective users of the app to create a plan for how to achieve any goal in the region. Lists of goals can then be sorted and filtered by importance, geographic area, or topic – allowing any user of the application to create their own way forward for the region.

Users can also display facts about themselves on their profiles, and promote their favorite goals through Facebook and Twitter.

In addition the site has standard website components such as a homepage and pages, which are administered by Power of 32 using the content management system Refinery.