What if citizens set the city budgets?
It’s not a fantasy, it happens in an ever growing number of cities, both small and big. By 2015, citizens of over 1,500 cities worldwide were helping to decide on what their city budget should be spent. This is...
How to make digital participation inclusive?
Digital participation succeeds in approaching certain groups that are difficult or impossible to reach with traditional forms of participation. But does digital participation also exclude certain groups?...
Our Team Retreat to Rethink Citizen Engagement
We spent a fantastic three days together with the whole team in the woods around Durbuy, Belgium. Wait, why a team retreat in the first place? That was exactly the question we asked everyone on the team before...
7 conditions for a successful online engagement process
The reason why so many cities and municipalities use digital platforms? A decision-maker always strives for the greatest possible transparency, inclusiveness and responsiveness. This is not only the case for daily...
Participatory budgeting: insights from more than 20 governments
As we are currently finalizing our platform’s new module for participatory budgeting, we researched this emerging domain extensively and listened to more than 20 city councils. From the Canadian Toronto (2.8...
Internal organization for online citizen participation within your municipality: a practical guide
Cities and municipalities are daily looking for ways to involve their citizens in policy and decision making. Using online applications are a common practice. But how do you install such an application in your...
What Makes a Good Online Citizen Participation Tool?
As you may have understood by now if you are a regular reader of the CitizenLab blog, enhancing your citizen engagement processes by adding a digital component is crucial. It is the answer to most of your questions...
![How to Reach 25% of Your Population at the Platform Launch [case study]](https://www.citizenlab.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/large_image-1.jpeg)
How to Reach 25% of Your Population at the Platform Launch [case study]
Marche-en-Famenne, a small town with 17.401 inhabitants in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, did a fantastic job at launching its CitizenLab participation platform. In less than one-week time, their e-democracy...
Launch Successful Online Participation Initiatives with the CitizenLab E-Participation Canvas
Launching a successful participation initiative online is not something that you should leave up to chance. It is essential that, even before the start of the citizen consultation, all the stakeholders sit around...
“Citizens have one expertise: the one of their needs” – Interview with Stephen Boucher
During the Interconnectés Forum 2017 in Lyon (France), we met up with Stephen Boucher, professor at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and author of the book...
![European Local Democracy Week 2017: Meeting the Democracy Builders [Videos]](https://www.citizenlab.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Capture-d’écran-2017-10-26-à-12.11.36.png)
European Local Democracy Week 2017: Meeting the Democracy Builders [Videos]
Earlier this October, the European Local Democracy Week took place, and we grabbed this opportunity to meet the ones who build local democracy: officials, civil servants, entrepreneurs, etc. Discover below what...
How to Implement Successful Online Citizen Participation: 5 Tips We Heard From the Citizens Themselves
At CitizenLab, we come to work every day because we want to shape digital citizen participation. As an unstoppable urbanisation is taking place and cities might become more important than nations, it’s time to...
6 Urban Projects Built Thanks to Online Civic Engagement
Citizens and administration often work hand in hand on a lot of different projects: culture, urban planning, budget or even the organisation of a city event. But which projects are most likely to foster...
![13 Podcasts About the City of Tomorrow [Updated]](https://www.citizenlab.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Capture-d’écran-2017-08-10-à-15.09.54.png)
13 Podcasts About the City of Tomorrow [Updated]
If you need company during your tanning sessions on the beach, a relaxing sunday evening on the couch, or during your commute, or even if you just want to impress your friends and colleagues with your new found...
How Liège Gathered 95k Votes on Its Civic Engagement Platform in Less than 4 Months
“We have been pioneers in citizen participation, but this time we really want to accelerate and change paradigm so as to hit a milestone.” – Jean-Christophe Peterkenne, Strategy Director of the City of Liège....
3 Citizen Profiles You May Be Missing out If You Don’t Use Online Citizen Participation
As a policy-maker, you are aware that citizen participation is key to building inclusive municipalities. To collect the ideas of your fellow citizens, you know the drill: paper polls, town hall meetings, and even...
Civic Tech’s Next Breakthrough? Spatial Cocreation
Crowdsourcing platforms already are a great solution for environment planning, but they could revolutionise it altogether. Web platforms for local cocreation are an essential component of the ongoing democratic...
How to Measure Success in Online Citizen Engagement
Engaging citizens in policy-making on the internet is a relatively new practice, but one that usually comes with massive expectations. But what exactly should be measured when we speak of true success in an online...
5 Tips for Opening Government Data
It seems we still live in the infancy of open government data, which is all about availability and quality. In this post we submit 5 more suggestions to usher in the mature age: open data as a prized participation...
![Opening Government Data for Citizen Engagement [a Checklist]](https://www.citizenlab.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Open-Data-500x333.jpg)
Opening Government Data for Citizen Engagement [a Checklist]
It seems we still live in the infancy of open government data, which is all about availability and quality. In this post we submit 4 suggestions to usher in the mature age: open data as a prized citizen...
How can open data feed citizen engagement?
Open Belgium 2017 –the Belgian conference on open knowledge– is now only a few weeks away. One of its core themes is the leveraging of open data to increase citizen participation in public life and policy-making....
Belgium Has Got a Problem with Citizen Participation
The Economist has just released the ninth edition of its annual Democracy Index, and it features a somber view of Belgium. Our federal monarchy comes 35th globally, behind Italy, India, Botswana, and… Trump’s...
Designing Community Participation, Building Political Engagement
Opportunities to engage directly with decision-making have been flourishing for citizens over the last few years. They take many different forms, but all too often face the same challenge: too few people take part,...
What is the Difference between Citizen Engagement and Participation?
Over the last years, there has been a shift from a top-down governance to a more horizontal governance. This new way of governing includes all the stakeholders of a public policy project, such as public...
8 Steps to Effective Participatory Budgeting
Participatory budgeting is an important process for inclusive and accountable governance. It allows cities and towns to educate, engage, and empower their citizens along with strengthening their governance. It has...
Participatory Budget: The Beginners Guide
A participatory budget is an innovative policymaking tool which directly involves citizens in policy decisions. It was first used in 1989 in Brazil and, since then, 1,500 times participatory budgets have been...
3 Tips to Blend Online and Offline Citizen Engagement
Online or offline citizen engagement, which strategy is best? Both online and offline platforms have their merits and when combined, they can be incredibly effective. Yet, cities don’t do this...
5 Citizen-Centric Sessions You Cannot Miss at SCEWC16
Gathering over 600 cities and more than 14.000 visitors, the Smart City Expo World Congress brings together urban leaders from Nov 15-17 in Barcelona. This year’s edition is focused on the role of smart...
How These 10 Belgian Cities Are Using CitizenLab
Already more than 10 Belgian cities and municipalities are using CitizenLab to boost their online citizen engagement. As the software allows cities to easily fit in the current ongoing projects, all these cities...
How to Inject Startup Mentality into Bureaucratic Governments
Governments – these bureaucratic, inefficient organisations we all know – are more and more willing to reinvent themselves and their way of working. Startups can be a great inspiration source for this....
4 Emerging Technology Trends in Citizen Engagement
Digital technology is rapidly transforming the way cities are engaging with their citizens, and vice versa. To stand out from the crowd as a city government, it is critical to embrace and implement the following...
From Talk to Action: Kickstart Your Smart City Plans
Wondering how to make your city smarter? But what does the buzzword “smart city” actually entails? What are the fields on which you could work on to turn your city into a “smart” one? And what are the first steps...
5 Most Common Myths About Citizen Participation
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about citizen participation and what it entails. This article aims at uncovering some of them notably by showing the differences between online and offline participation....
The Ladder of Citizen Participation in the Digital Era
Citizen participation refers to the process during which citizens are given the opportunity to participate in the public decision-making process. The government can decide to what extent the citizen’s opinion will...
Open Data for Government: A Gentle Introduction
“Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available for everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.” This implies that data...
Three Alternatives to a Referendum
With the Brexit just behind us, questions arise about the eligibility of a referendum for asking people’s opinion. A referendum issue should stand on its own. In the Brexit case, it was clear that the EU...
