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
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 participation tool....
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...