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...
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...
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...
New Admin Dashboard for Your Citizen Participation
Do you want to easily oversee how your community of citizens engages online? We do think so! That’s why we created an analytics dashboard for city administrators that show you all key metrics in a nutshell....
Meet CitizenLab at Smart City InFocus in Yinchuan
The Chinese city of Yinchuan and TM Forum organise this week an impressive Smart City conference called ‘Smart City InFocus‘. The conference gathers both public and private leaders in the smart city...
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...
Belgian City of Ostend launches citizensourcing platform
The city of Ostend (Oostende) launched its city platform this week! This city has decided to use CitizenLab in order to co-create the city with the help of their citizens. Ostend can understand the vision of their...
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...
Belgian city of Geel launches citizensourcing platform for urban planning
The city of Geel has launched its city platform one week ago! They will use CitizenLab to gain insights in how the citizens imagine the future of Geel, in order to co-construct the urban plans. Geel promotes...
City as a Platform: How It Changes Governance
What is the future role of city governments? As digital technologies are changing the way we interact with each other, cities have to undergo a transition as well. Tomorrow’s government is not merely a...
Four Steps to Enhanced Crowdsourcing
Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has grown to significance through crowdfunding, crowd collaboration, crowd voting, and crowd labor. The idea behind crowdsourcing is simple: decentralize decision-making by...
Why Govtech Is Europe’s Next Big Thing
Even in the digital era we’re currently in, using online government services can sometimes feel like stepping into a time machine. However, governments across Europe are waking up to the need to bring their...
5 Inspiring TED Talks About Our Governments In The Digital Age
New governance technologies are redefining authority and change what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. Thanks to this digital transformation, decision-making will become more collaborative,...
Only Smart Citizens can enable true Smart Cities
The concept of a Smart City, as advertised by tech giants like IBM, Cisco and Siemens, is a city with sensors in every aspect of everyday life, gathering large amounts of data and using algorithms to optimize...
Gamification in Citizen Participation
Before getting your hands dirty with building a citizen participation programme, rethink why citizens would participate nota bene. Understanding the motivations and motives of citizens correctly leads to a more...
10 Must-Read Books About The City Of Tomorrow
With the Easter holidays coming up, you might find some more time to grab a book and learn about the city of tomorrow. We have curated our favourite list of books in the fields of urbanism, governments,...
Why Citizen Experts Are The New Paradigm
We have the means to build a strong digital environment where citizens can connect with each other. This opens up the possibility of calling upon their collective expertise. So, why do we still put forward an...
Hack With Refugees: A Roundup
More than one month ago, CitizenLab started — in collaboration with a community of Brussels-based positive impact entrepreneurs — crowdsourcing ideas about how to turn the arrival of refugees into...
3 Key Learnings To Move Forward With Citizen Engagement & Co-Creation
We’re moving towards a new era. An era of smart cities with citizens actively involved in problem-solving, innovation and decision-making. Smart cities are often depicted to be about digital technologies only, but...
