Elyze: rumours, updates, news… The team interview.
Who initiated Elyze? When did the idea germinate? How long did you take to develop the app?
Elyze was founded by Grégoire Cazcarra and François Mari with The Committed then joined by myself, the founder of the site The pencil and Gaspard G. the political youtuber. The idea is to make it possible to discover the presidential elections differently, with a “civictech” tool which makes it possible to learn about the programs and sort preferences between candidates. The app has been in development since October with the firm ambition to be ready by early 2022. Changes to improve it with all the feedback are already on the agenda.
It’s a titanic job to list the candidates’ proposals, isn’t it? Especially since some must be very close without being identical… And then there are the “Find out more” parts which must not have been easy to synthesize…
It is thanks to the tremendous work of the Engagés with Marie Lafarge at the helm who ensured the greatest neutrality and thoroughness of the proposals with the aim of allowing the greatest fairness between the candidates. Of course, some candidates will definitively reformulate certain proposals a little later, but they will be added with the greatest care.
Also read: Elyze: an application for better voting?
On Twitter, users found surprising results. Some, for example, said “Yes” to all the proposals and with 100% “affinity” with all the candidates, they were offered Emmanuel Macron in front of the others. Since it’s Twitter, people have bound to see evil where there was none. Can you tell us more ?
The worst part of it all is that we didn’t expect it to appear like this. The order in which this had ordered them is the order in which the candidates had been added in the code of the application. This problem has been resolved and we have put an alphabetical order, the most neutral classification possible that we have found. We have always planned to improve the project with the feedback we receive.
On our side, we had to write rather vague results when we too often kicked in touch with the button “I do not know”. Do you recommend being as “categorical” as possible?
I think it’s hard to say, our application is not intended to be an electoral confidant, but rather a gateway to the 2022 presidential election, the whole subject is to open the debate and motivate our generation (18 -34 years old) to go to the polls. Our priority as citizens is to be informed about what our democracy offers us, and we would like to help with that. This is also totally in line with us: Grégoire, founder of a citizens’ association, Gaspard, whose videos have provided crazy intellectual support for hundreds of thousands of young people for 6 years, and me with Le Crayon, which we have made become the most big digital debate media.
Read also: WhatsApp: a chatbot to motivate young people to vote in the presidential elections
You are also blamed for recovering the data. On social networks, we saw that it was to help Macron, the Trotkysts or the reptilians (we don’t remember well): what is the recovered data used for?
The data collected will give rise to surveys which we will allow to be disseminated to the general public either by Elyze and its social networks (follow us on Instagram !), or by large or less large public media partners. However, no data will be sold to anyone. Our goal is to become a relay for citizens’ demands and choices, because we are also a spokesperson for our young generation.
To narrow down the results, you will need a little help from the campaign teams. Have you had any contacts so far? Are there any updates planned for Elyze?
Yes, yes and again yes. Contacts are established, improvements are carried out, and the rest will only be more precise, relevant and complete about the 2022 campaign. Until then, if you are not familiar with the programs and proposals of the campaign, we found on Elyze (android Where iOS), we are already more than a million.
