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| Political-IT startup PoliGround CEO Seo Jung-ho / Courtesy of Seo Jung-ho |
In July, Seo launched an online platform that offers public opinions of politicians through a sort of virtual stock market, named PoliGround, where users are given free cyber money to make transactions on politicians who are represented as virtual stocks.
"In the early 2000s, there was a service called POSDAQ where users traded politicians as stocks, but it closed after a few years of operation. At that time, there were only web-based services without smartphones and the internet was slow. Stock trading was not yet popular among members of the public and the user experience was inconvenient," Seo said in an email interview with The Korea Times, Monday.
"However, with the advent of smartphones, stock trading has become so popular that there are 10 million stock accounts in the real stock market and the user experience has become very convenient."
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| Political-IT startup PoliGround offers an online platform that shows public opinions of politicians through virtual stock market services where users make transactions of stocks representing politicians. Courtesy of Poli Ground |
The CEO of PoliGround said the tendency of citizens to participate actively in politics has increased significantly in recent years and their feeling of political participation has risen, but the will of the voters is still not conveyed accurately to politicians, and the current channels through which voters and politicians could interact are insufficient.
"Other fields have been developing quickly along with the development of the IT industry by actively applying IT, but I was critical of why only the political field was repeating past practices, allowing only limited participation by voters. I think we need to go further from the limited political participation, in which the will of the voters is conveyed through voting once every few years," Seo said.
"By combining politics and IT technologies, PoliGround offers a platform where citizens and politicians express and deliver opinions in real time."
Seo said his company also aims to provide big data analysis of public opinion, by analyzing stock transaction data to observe detailed trends such as age, region, political inclination of shareholders of each politician and political party.
"We want to make a ground that serves as a political melting pot where diverse opinions erupt, mix and fuse, rather than approaching politics with the frame of good and evil or right and wrong," Seo said.
