THE WISCONSIN TOGETHER PLATFORM
Uniting Against Mass Incarceration
Incarceration in Wisconsin is a catastrophic problem. Currently, the state of Wisconsin has over 41,000 people incarcerated. Absurdly, incarceration accounts for more of Wisconsin’s spending than the entire University of Wisconsin system. Numerous organizations have attempted to counteract this problem. However, these organizations have not been able to make a sizeable impact on incarceration rates in Wisconsin. Why? They simply do not collaborate. That is why we, the Wisconsin Together Platform, are driven to make it simple and effective.
UNDERSTANDING THE WISCONSIN TOGETHER PLATFORM
The Process:
We began this project in September 2018 with little direction and a very broad mission statement. After initial meetings with Julilly Kohler and Dr. “Biko” Baker, we began to develop a vision for the project. We decided to focus on connecting organizations better through an online platform.
During late fall and throughout winter, we met with numerous organizations and individuals and gathered information that would help guide us to specific features of the final platform. During this process, we reframed our idea to include re-entry programs’ information within the website. The purpose of this is to assist post-incarcerated people in finding services that will help them when they leave incarceration.
We continued to meet with organization leaders but changed our focus to begin developing a roadmap for the future website. After creating epics and stories of how each feature would function, look, and be organized, we developed a presentation of our vision of the final product. Later, we presented to two groups of people and acquired our feedback for the website.
In the future, we plan on taking the information that we acquired from our meetings to develop the first version of the website.
The Results:
By the end of the 2018-2019 academic year, the Wisconsin Decarceration Platform team was able to compile a document containing a summary of all of our research as well as a detailed roadmap that defines next steps for the project. To view the roadmap document, click on the button below this section.
This roadmap contains the trajectory that our project group was headed on during our time working on the project. This holds information on the main organizations that we worked closely with and the main features that added the most value for the community. The order of features that we found would be most impactful are:
Re-Entry Service page for people to find services for them or their clients
Realtime Congress updates from Madison
Organization calendar for organizations to post events
Help the Cause page for outside individuals to engage with organizations
