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Civic Ladder

Open Civic Ladder from the root navigation to browse geographic community contexts — from broad regions down to neighborhoods. Leaderboards, Community Energy, and Our Media Diet all use this ladder so comparisons stay local.

Why levels exist

Local civic life is real, but messy:

  • Different people mean different things by “local.”
  • Some regions have counties, some don’t.
  • Neighborhood boundaries can be fuzzy.

Symthink’s goal is to provide a consistent ordering of contexts (from broad → local) so the app can answer questions like:

  • “Who is most engaged-with in my city?”
  • “What sources are most cited in my county?”
  • “How do state-level leaders compare within the state context?”

What you see on a level page

When you tap a level on the Civic Ladder, you get three tabs:

Tab What it shows
Thinkers Civic thought leaders ranked in this area
Questions Published question nodes from leaders here
Dashboard Our Visioning Stats and Community Energy for the area

On Thinkers, tap the Sources chip to open Our Media Diet (regional citation patterns). See citations-and-publisher-stats.md and community-energy-dashboard.md.

That means:

  • Rankings on Thinkers are within a community context (not global popularity),
  • Community Energy on Dashboard measures civic vitality for the area this month,
  • and Our Media Diet is regional, not universal.

Switching your civic area

If you publish your Vision, you can move it to a different level on your Civic Ladder (for example, from county to state). That changes which leaderboard you compete on and which regional media diet your citations contribute to.

  • Unranked leaders (not yet assigned a rank) can switch freely while exploring which level fits.
  • Ranked leaders must wait 48 hours between moves. The app shows this commitment before you confirm a move, and shows how long remains if you try again too soon.
  • After a move, leaderboards and regional analytics refresh for both the area you left and the one you joined (usually within a few seconds).

Switch your active civic area from Dashboard → Sharing → Manage Sharing or from the Civic Ladder screen.

The local-first principle

Symthink is intentionally local-first:

  • civic credibility should be earned locally,
  • local leadership should be discoverable,
  • and higher-level influence should not be “teleported” without grounded engagement.

Community Energy and Civic Resonance (leader ranking share) carry this principle on the civic-level Dashboard and Thinkers tab.