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? Inclusiveness means that you do not exclude any group in society. Digital participation is inclusive when you reach every group in society, and...
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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 political work in the field, in the municipal council or in other administrative bodies, but also online. Politicians usually...
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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 daily operation and organization, within the radar of existing decision-making and consultation processes? How do you...
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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 regarding civic engagement: how do I reach more people? How do I...
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“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. And they definitely did. With its CitizenLab platform #RéinventionsLiège, the city of Liège (Belgium) collected more...
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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 sometimes wandering around the town market on Sunday mornings to fetch your citizens input. But are...
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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 tool. 1. Answer data demand An excellent way to create databases...
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