Of the various finalists at this year’s World e-Gov Forum, the one that most impressed me (and apparently also the judges, as it was a winner of the pan-Europe e-democracy award) was Citizens.is, the Citizens Foundation of Iceland. Born in 2008 in the wake of Iceland’s economic collapse and the sudden loss of trust in the island nation’s political class, the Citizens Foundation is a group of civic hackers who stepped in to help meet the demand for greater citizen participation in governance.
Their key offering is an “Open Active Democracy” platform that they’ve built over the last three years and keep developing, which is designed to help citizens debate and prioritize issues. It’s been used in various settings to valuable effect:
Betri Reykjavik (or “Better Reykjavik”) was launched a week before municipal elections in the country’s capital city, independent of any party. Twenty thousand people, 40% of the voters, participated on the site, with about one thousand priorities listed and sorted. That version of their platform has now been integrated permanently into the city’s administration. Every month city officials take the top priorities bubbled up on the site, run a cost evaluation and then give feedback back to the public on whether they will be implemented and why.
Skuggaþing (or “Shadow Parliament”) fetches data and video from the official Icelandic Parliament website, and then allows users to comment and rate proposals and add their own talking points discussing their merits.
Your Priorities is the generic version of the platform, which Citizens.is is offering to users across the world, country-by-country. In Greece, it’s already been taken up by some of the people protesting the country’s economic situation. The top suggestions bubbling up: to have the church pay taxes like everyone else, and to remove parliamentary immunity for Greek members of Parliament.
The Your Priorities platform is open source (written in Ruby), and its developers are hopeful that others will take their code and work with it.