Re:Imagining Democracy

What are the best online platforms hosting citizen engagement success stories? Let’s compare the four main ones:

1. CitizENGAGE
2. Participedia
3. Innovation in politics
4. Citizens Lab

Quick summary of the main conclusions

If a citizen or an organization wants to share their own success story, CitizENGAGE provides the easiest way to do so. The drawback: only some select cases are shown on the main page, and it is not likely that every submission gets published.

From the perspective of someone doing research in participatory democracy, Participedia – collecting information on 836 different cases – is the best resource for citizen engagement best practices, some of the older entries going back to 2011. Similarly, if the intention of a citizen or an organization goes beyond just sharing the story, Participedia is the best option – one can describe each case very thoroughly.  Nevertheless, the number of cases mages navigating the database difficult.

CitizENGAGE

CitizENGAGE is a platform developed by the Open Government Partnership. It hosts best practice stories from OGP member countries, along with news feeds, videos and photo essays.

An average of 60 success stories are divided between the following regions: Africa, Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe. Main topics incorporated in the site are, besides citizen participation, anti-corruption, civic space, education, gender, health, marginalized communities, and natural resources.

Submitting an impact story appears to be fairly simple: via email, Facebook post, or Twitter. There is no information regarding what percentage of those submissions are published in the main site.

Clear selection options provide an easy navigation and exploration of the database. Precise selection criteria allow to search by region or topic. Most of cases only provide a brief contextualization of the situation or problem, and how open government or citizen engagement managed to deliver a solution. Some examples provide links to sites with concrete data about the project (methodology, statistics, number of people involved, duration, among others). This additional information can be offered by OGP, by the ones responsible of leading the project, or by a third party (media).

Participedia

Participedia functions as a depository of examples of participatory democracy in different regions of the world. Mainly supported by international universities, it is also backed by research councils and NGOs.

­

This site includes 836 cases, dating back to 2011. Given the numerous amount of case examples available in Participedia, it is difficult to identify a single main topic. However, database is divided in two categories:

General Issues (Urban Planning, Community Development, Budgeting, Political Institutions,  Environment, Economic Development, Health, Education and Schools, Human Rights, Identity and Diversity, Poverty Reduction, etc.)

Specific Topics:  (Municipal Participatory Budget and Planning, Civic Education, Sustainable Development, Government Decentralization, Democratic Innovation, and Urban Redevelopment, etc.)

In order to submit a new case (or add or edit them), or to participate in post discussions, one needs to create and account and be a registered member of the site. While it can feel saturated, and scrolling through 836 cases might seem overwhelming, a keyword search allows for specific case identification. Similarly, searches can be defined by content language, country, geographical scope, completeness of the project, type of organization, source of funding, targeted audience, among others.

Participedia has a thorough template for each case submission, which includes: Summary, Problems and purpose, History (context), Originating Entities and Funding, Participant Recruitment and Selection, Methods and Tools Used, Deliberation, Decisions, and Public Interaction, Influence, Outcomes, and Effects, Analysis and Criticism, Secondary Sources, External Links, and Notes. While some examples fill out every category, providing extensive information about the case, it is not compulsory to do so. Some examples only provide minimum information about their projects. An example of a thoroughly detailed case can be found here.

Innovation in politics 

Innovation in politics functions as a non-partisan consulting agency for politicians and political institutions. Apart from their services, they also provide a space for submission of projects and compete for the “Innovation in Politics” award (for “groundbreaking and innovative political projects”). The winners are selected by a jury of hundreds of volunteer jurors from Innovation in politics member countries.

While it is not its main objective, Innovation for Politics does have a catalogue of 80 past submissions, divided between 8 categories: Civilization, Democracy, Human rights, Community, Ecology, Prosperity, Jobs, and Quality of life. Topics are varied: digital literacy in schools, usage of a centralized, local currency (the “Bristol pound”), organization of Citizen Cafes (roundtables), refugee integration programs, “Towards zero waste” plans, and video sign-language translation, among others.

The submissions made to this site are not presented as a database, but they are eligible to the “Innovation in Politics.” Submissions are exclusive: the “project owner” must be an individual or political body with a position or political mandate. There is also a template for submissions: it must include a title, a short description, and must fall within one of the following categories:

• Civilization (arts, education, science and European society)
• Ecology (agriculture, environmental protection, energy)
• Democracy (participation, transparency, self-determination)
• Human rights (women’s affairs, equality, minority rights)
• Prosperity (business environment, technology, finance)
• Jobs (labor market)
• Quality of Life (health care, social security, housing, mobility)
• Community (empowerment, civic involvement)

Also, information about participation, trust-building, and sustainability must be included. Additional information about the project can be added. This year’s deadline was 15 July.

The site mostly focuses on presenting the organization and describing the services they provide. The database is not accessible as a whole, and only after finding past project submissions, they can be identified by categories.

Some cases include an introduction, a short video with an introduction, official web site link, pictures, and a downloadable PDF information leaflet in the project’s language. While some cases only provide a summary, it is worth noticing that Innovation in Politics stipulates that votes for choosing winning projects will be made based on available information.

Citizens Lab

This organization is a European network that links multidisciplinary professionals and activists that created workshops and projects that emphasize citizen engagement and “new approaches on decision-making.” Those workshops, or labs, are “experimental spaces” where prototype approaches are tested on a local level, and if successful, will be extended via Citizens Lab’s network.[1]

Citizens Lab has 23 success stories and initiatives, along with detailed results of member’s network meetings. Principal topics are Urban transformation, Network creation, Community engagement, Democracy, Education, Inclusion, Culture and Arts. Some concrete examples include: transformation of derelict areas into shared public spaces, conferences and meetups to promote similarities between the UK and Hungary (aimed at reducing prejudice), translocal promotion of participatory budgeting, and effective dialogue workshops that seek to “harness collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups.”[2]

Citizens Lab allocates a section of the site to share success stories. But the link appears to be broken (September 2018). No further information is provided about sharing stories via email or social media. Visually, this website is very well done. Navigation-wise, the actual cases are easy to find, and can be filtered by the main topics described above.

Each case description contains a very detailed, experience-based narrative. Some of the methodologies are mentioned but casually, as part of the whole description. There is not a unified template for initiative description. While the free-form description is refreshing, it also complicates finding precise information (method, funding, intended audience, objectives, outcomes, etc.), about the case being shared.

[1] Retrieved from: https://www.citizenslab.eu/labs/

[2] Retrieved from: http://www.artofhosting.org/what-is-aoh/

Written by Luis Roberto Vera,

intern at the Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS

A short review of an app that was used to brainstorm ideas during OGP Summit in Paris

Links: Toguna for Android;  Toguna for Iphone

Benefits:

1. If your audience has smartphones and access to quality wifi, then installing + learning to use Toguna would take around 1 minute. Toguna is easy to install and its usability is quite intuitive.
2. Toguna it useful if you need to receive some general feedback from your audience over  certain idea/issue/problem – it is very easy for everyone to share their feedback and vote (like/dislike) on the ideas of others. You would also get a general sense on what might be potential solutions to some problem.
3. It’s a good way to engage your audience if your event does not allow for much time for audience to ask questions/participate in discussion

Limits:

1. As an idea crowdsourcing too it is simplistic – the design of the app provileges shorter ideas over those that require more text;
2. Even though theoretically people can comment on each idea, in reality this option is not being used (again: because of design of the app which privileges sharing ever-new ideas and voting of ideas on others);
3. In none of the three Toguna discussions( that took place during OGP Summit) the idea that was voted to be the most popular had been particularly innovative or enlightening.

Overall, Toguna a decent app but it encounters the same issues as other crowd brainstorming platforms that I’m aware of: 1) form dominates over considerations of quality content (simplicity for the sake of simplicity); 2) assumption that crowd-voting (rather than epertise) is a good way of discerning between good and bad ideas.

Some of the most unorthodox, soul searching ideas heard during the second day of the OGP summit in Paris:

1) Some approaches to public sector accountability might be incompatible with trust in government. For this reason, Sweden is currently trying to move away from its previous governmental philosophy that was based on the principles of the New Public Management (treating State as a result-oriented company that needs to please its clients) in order to experiment with approaches that are less based on the need to control (or to hold someone accountable) and to encourage more trust both within public service and between citizens and the public service.

2) We are used to treating openness as if it were a value in itself, but … is it? Is there anything of value that would be lost if openness were to be perceived only as a means to some more tangible social goal (such as quality education, quality healthcare, quality government, etc?)

3) Concept of open-washing or openness as a double-edged sword. Openness and transparency might be and sometimes are used as tools on behalf of some state entity for dubious purposes – for example, in order to justify some bad policy decisions (say, at least they were taken in an open process!) or to denigrate political competition. Should one encourage openness in such cases as well (in order to strengthen the later plea for consistency – to ‘practice what one preaches’)? This refers back to the previous point: should openness be promoted for the sake of openness or only as a means to some social good?

4) Is there a way to prevent transparency being used as a political tool in hands of populists who gladly use public information for anti-establishment rhetoric but do not apply the same transparency standards to their own actions (remember Trump’s tax returns and dismal performance on Fact Check)?

5) Is there any good evidence that openness does more good than harm? Trust in EU has not visibly improved since the Union became more open a few years ago. Improved openness was not an argument in recent US election as well. It’s also unclear how much of an impact various openness promoting instruments (for example, lobbying regulations) have and how trustworthy are claims of various open-government champions in specific communities on having achieved a huge impact: has there been some neutral evaluations on whether specific claims have/have not been exaggerated in order to ‘sell’ their achievements?

6) Is the term ‘open government’ too abstract, distant and vague to mobilise people (especially in some cultures, such as in Francophone world)? Is there a need for a language change? What about ‘responsive government’?

Those are all open questions without clear answers. And yet I’d probably be less inclined (than before comming to this event) to believe that openness without quality public engagement and citizen education is necessarily a good in intself.

[Iveta]

[Part of a series of blogposts from Open Government Partnership Summit in Paris]

A green two-way street sign pointing to Liberal and Conservative, representing the two dominant political parties and ideologies in national and global politics

Yesterday I’ve noticed that there are three important issues where OGP activists/organizers tend to have differing ‘ideologies’:

Cleavage No 1. Is it benefitial to have as many as possible countries joining OGP even if it might be clear that some of them would not meet the basic standards of openness, citizen engagement, governmental accountability? On one hand, access to OGP process and best practice sharing could motivate transformations; on other hand – this might result in loss of credibility for OGP as a process.  Defining question: is Hungary withdrawing from OGP (link) a good or a bad sign for OGP? What about Morocco making an attempt to join?

Cleavage No 2 (probably inspired by post-Brexit referendum, post-US election worries). Should OGP strive to include as many civil society groups as possible or should it, instead, focus on strengthening and deepening engagement on part of those civil society groups that are directly interested in governance and citizen engagement issues so that they are able to sustain their engagement with the government beyond development of the national action plan? Even if one might wish to do both simultaneously, it is rarely feasible. Defining question:  if given a choice, should OGP activists attempt to extend their network to organisations that have not been interested in OGP agenda or should they try to deepen their existing engagement? In other words, should one go broader or should one go deeper?

Cleavage No 3 (related to No 2). How far OGP should stretch its original mission in order to accomodate the demands of those civic activists and governmental representatives who advocate for having a clear and tangible impact on people’s lives (which is not always easily visible in cases of  increased transparency)? Defining question – would you feel some discomfort if a governmental representative would name an improved digital service (for example, a new heathcare or education electronic system) as a national OGP achievement? On one hand, digital services have little to do with opennness, but, on the other hand, that’s where majority of people are likely to see clear impact on their lives.

[Iveta]