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Tag: civic engagement

HomeAll PostsTag: civic engagement
CitizenLab's Blog
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    • CitizenLab for participatory budgeting
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Civic Engagement

8 steps to participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting can be a powerful tool for cities to educate, engage, and empower communities. This blog post is an excerpt from our Beginner’s Guide to Participatory Budgeting. Curious to learn more? Download it for free! What is a participatory budget? Over the years, participatory budgeting has become a buzzword...
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Case Studies, Civic Engagement

Case study: collective urban planning in the London Borough of Newham

The London Borough of Newham has launched its consultation platform to include residents, businesses and shoppers in urban planning decisions. With the desire to include more Newham residents in the democratic and decision-making process, Newham launched a Democracy and Civic Participation Commission in 2019. From November 2019 to February 2020,...
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Civic Engagement, Participatory Budgeting
Engaging young residents in local policy-making process: 5 key learnings
By Simon Pastor30/11/2020
Civic Engagement

The ladder of citizen participation in the digital era

As you may know by now, “citizen participation” refers to the process of allowing citizens to participate in the public decision-making process. When it comes to citizen participation, the government usually decides the extent to which citizens’ opinions will be taken into account. After all, not all types of participation...
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Civic Engagement

Monthly Civic Tech Reads #9

Every month, we curate a list of interesting articles and thought pieces within the realm of Civic Tech and digital democracy. COVID-inspired tech innovations, AI and European regulations affecting privacy, and Londoners deciding on the usage of their data: data and tech were the talks of the town this month....
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Civic Engagement
3 Tips to Mix Online and Offline Community Engagement
By Ilona Lodewijckx16/06/2020
Civic Engagement

5 Tips for Civic Hacking

This weekend marks the 7th annual National Day of Civic Hacking in the United States. To celebrate, we thought we would share our own experience with civic hacking along with some lessons we have learned along the way. Civic hacking is the act of quickly improving the processes and systems...
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Civic Engagement, Smart Cities

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 everything in the city like routing traffic, maintaining water and air quality, positioning of police officers and even the planting of trees to keep bees away from primary schools.

The Smart City concept has found its way from the R&D department of tech companies into academic research, agendas of policy makers and even into reality, like the Songdo Smart City in South Korea. The Smart City has numerous benefits, including the following:

  • It is environmental friendly as it can regulate energy consumption and generation perfectly;
  • It can optimize traffic as it can guide drivers and thereby prevent congestion;
  • It is safe as it can detect crime before it even happens.

Automated decision-making kills citizen engagement

The problem of the Smart Cities, in the way proposed by many of these companies, is that they are merely a means to monetize the “Internet-of-Things”. It will shift the power from the citizens to a top-down city control centre, the same citizen-power that makes a city so attractive to live in. The logic of the city is based on chaos and diversity. The undiscovered food place on the corner of the street, the random encounters with strangers and the diversity of everything around you are the features of urban life that make the cities a joy to live in. This convergence of human and machine intelligence is rattling traditional decision-making, creating robot-municipal administrators without the critical feeling for the city or its citizens.

The bottom-up Smart Citizens

I am not opposed to the use of data to tackle the world’s largest wicked problem: the environment. On the contrary, as the price of sensors have dropped significantly, I believe that the Internet-of-Things can be a revolutionary contribution to tackling this problem, for instance with smart meters, smart intersections and heat distribution initiatives like Nerdalize (a network of cloud computing servers placed in local residences, enabling a high-end computing platform and free heating). However, these initiatives should have a bottom-up nature, as the top-down approach of the ‘ideal’ Smart City that is being proposed today, will destroy democracy and citizen engagement. These citizen-led innovations in the Smart City will create Smart Citizens. The dilemma lies in the fact that things which enable these citizen-led initiatives – the sensors and infrastructure – are difficult to realize without the top-down approach.

Policy-makers, time to open your eyes!

More and more bottom-up initiatives that will enable both a smart city and also empowers citizens are being realized, including the Things Network, a crowdsourced city-wide Internet of Things data network that originated in Amsterdam. Another example is CitizenLab, which is a (smart) citizens participation platform that allows local developers to build their own applications for their own city. Local developers and startups have a prime role in order to compete with the ‘let’s-control-it-all’ Smart City like proposed by the tech giants. I am curious to see these initiatives develop. However, to fully enable the potential, policy-makers will need to open their eyes to these initiatives, as we still have long way to go from the top-down Smart City paradigm.

What is your opinion on the top-down versus bottom-up discussion regarding Smart Cities? And what other initiatives have high potential to be essential for the Smart City? Please share your opinion.

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Civic Engagement
Hack With Refugees: A Roundup
By CitizenLab12/01/2016
Civic Engagement

5 Reasons Why Your City Should Start Online Civic Engagement

Civic engagement refers to the practice of encouraging citizens to become involved in the community life and help shape the community’s future. Thanks to the rise of modern technologies, your city government can nowadays also use online means to get closer to its citizens. And the time is right to do so. Let’s highlight the five most prominent reasons...
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