Citizen initiatives are participatory tools that allow citizens to influence their local institutions by collecting signatures. They generally don’t require a lot of effort and have the potential to reach a wide audience and reduce social bias. Citizen initiatives are a great way for citizens to get involved in local...
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The Flemish city of Leuven (101,000 inhabitants) has made the leap towards citizen participation! During this first project on the city’s strategic planning, over 3,000 inhabitants raised their voices. In June 2019, the city council launched its first large-scale participation campaign under the slogan “Leuven, maak het mee” (a play...
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When setting up a participation platform, the matter of trust is something that pops up quite often. We live in an era where online privacy is a vague concept and citizen’s trust in their governments seems to decline every day. And the introduction of an online platform can raise a...
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The launch of a participation platform can have a decisive influence on the rest of the project, but it’s often overlooked for lack of time or resources. In order to reach as many citizens as possible and reflect a wide array of voices within your community, digital platforms need to...
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Can natural language processing and machine learning technologies foster quicker political response to citizen views on digital democracy platforms? With the Nesta Collective Intelligence Grants Programme, this is the central question we will be researching over the coming months. In many citizen participation projects, the main challenge isn’t to gather...
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This article has been written in close collaboration with the NLP experts at NLP Town, who supported us through our own NLP journey. Will robots take over the world? Probably not. However, NLP (or Natural Language Processing) already has. In recent years, a technology that was hesitant at best has...
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In tackling the challenges of affordable housing, the Canadian city of Vancouver put the decision-making power where it belongs: with its people. The 2,530,746 Vancouverites were encouraged to share their ideas on the allocation of the estimated $30 million revenue generated by the Empty Homes Tax. The appeal led to...
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