The Future of Europe: Our 3 Takeaways from the Eurocities Debate
Yesterday, I had the honor to share my ideas on the future of Europe during a Eurocities debate in the city hall of Ghent. The panel consisted of Daniël Termont (Mayor of Ghent and Eurocities president), Laia Ortiz...
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...
The Future of GovTech: Key Takeaways from Pioneers
Last week I had the privilege to represent CitizenLab at an exclusive gathering between some of Europe’s most influential decision-makers and a small group of GovTech startups who were handpicked by the...
CitizenLab discusses future of governments with EU’s Vice-President
This Thursday 1st of June 2017, CitizenLab will join an expert panel of Presidents, Ministers and forward thinking influencers in a discussion of how governments could improve transparency, implement crowdsourced...
3 Ways of Capturing Citizen Input
We learned from our customers that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to capture citizen feedback. You want to make use of the mechanism that optimally serves the needs of your participatory design....
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...
Why the Blockchain Could Transform the Face of Digital Democracy
Blockchain, the ground-breaking technology for decentralisation underlying the bitcoin, could play a prominent role towards stronger democracies in the digital age. Although wide-scale case studies...
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...
The City of Liege Reinvents Itself with CitizenLab
The City of Liege has launched its city platform beginning of March! CitizenLab is helping the city reach out to its citizens to tackle the challenges of tomorrow in a digital way. Liege wants to co-create its...
King Awards CitizenLab as Belgium’s “Student Startup of the Year”
CitizenLab has been named Belgium’s ‘Student Startup of the Year’ in the presence of the Belgian King. Our team, of which the founders are young graduates, get honored for their impact on digital...
![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....
CitizenLab Receives European Union Funding
CitizenLab is now co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union. Our project received €50.000 in funds after being selected for the SME Instrument Phase 1 for start-up. Moreover, CitizenLab was...
Flemish and Walloon governments are co-creating their policy for Brussels
“How do the residents of Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia experience their capital?” This is what Flemish Minister for Brussels Affairs Sven Gatz (Open VLD) and his french-speaking colleague Rachid...
New Features: Blogging & Social Media Feed
As we want our platform to be the core of the collaboration between political institutions and cities, we added some new exciting features to it. Now, institutions can also blog and include their social media...
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...
Belgian city of Vilvoorde successfully launches CitizenLab platform
The City of Vilvoorde has launched its city platform end of January! CitizenLab is helping them to centralize their participation efforts in a digital way. Vilvoorde promotes citizen participation The City of...
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,...
How is the Civic Innovation Network Helping Shape the City of Brussels?
All over the world, citizens are looking for new ways to improve their quality of life and make their city hear their voices. Some bottom-up collaborations have seized their needs and are already pushing the limits...
Geographical segmentation
Our civic engagement platform is now optimized for geographical segmentation. Both neighborhoods and project boundaries can be mapped precisely. How does it work? As an admin, one can enter the neighborhoods...
Multilingual Interface
Hola! Comment ça va? As from now you have your CitizenLab platform in multiple languages! As a company based in trilingual Belgium, we often got the request to have our platform available in multiple languages for...
Give Easily Feedback to Your Citizens
The extent to which citizens get feedback on their ideas from their city or municipality, is one of the key success factors for a participation platform. Yet, many municipalities struggle to find the resources to...
Groups and Role System
The key to a successful engagement project, is identifying all the involved stakeholders. Both internally and externally, people should be empowered in their roles. Grouping your stakeholders and giving them...
Dynamic Timeline
When engaging citizens online, it is crucial from the beginning to manage their expectations. Most engagement projects have a concrete decision making process. CitizenLab now introduces a dynamic timeline to help...
Citizen participation is much easier with CitizenLab latest version
We’re happy to share some very impactful product updates with you. Especially admins dispose over an even wider range of powerful weapons to steer citizen participation into their desired...
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...
Introducing Surveys
We’re proud to announce that surveys are now an integral part of the CitizenLab platform. On popular request from the cities using CitizenLab, we’ve added them as a first-class feature in our system....
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...
We’re shortlisted for the Smart City Award!
CitizenLab has been chosen as one of the 5 finalists for the 4YFN Smart City Award. At the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, taking place on 15-17 November 2016, CitizenLab will present itself on stage on 17/11 during...
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...
