Discussing eDemocracy with CitizenLab’s CEO
If you haven’t come across Central before, here’s a little introduction: we’re a design team specialized in creating user-friendly apps and websites. We also organize casual monthly events, called Umami Design Talks, during which we have a live interview on product design and management, share some homemade food and drink local beer. Our goal is to get the conversation going. We want to boost the digital product industry in Belgium and thereby help companies build better, more competitive products thanks to great design.
In March, our Umami guest was Wietse Van Ransbeeck, CEO of CitizenLab. Here’s an edited version of the chat we had.
Hi Wietse, thanks for being here. Let’s start by setting the scene. Could you tell us what CitizenLab is?
CitizenLab is a SaaS company which provides local governments with a platform through which they can collect input from their citizens. We made the decision to collaborate mostly with municipal governments because we think it’s usually at city-level that concrete ideas can be implemented. Some of the cities we work with are: Hasselt, Oostende, and Liège. When cities decide to use CitizenLab, they can customize the platform to suit their policy processes. In general, the main actions that can be taken on our platform are: posting an idea, commenting on other people’s ideas, and voting for or against suggestions. Based on this information, government officials can see which ideas have the most support and update their action plans accordingly.
At Central, we’ve designed debate platforms and noticed that often, a couple people take over the entire discussion. How do you prevent a few individuals from hogging your platform?
Getting people to participate online is always hard. According to Jakob Nielsen participation in online communities is not distributed equally. On average, 90% of online platform users are lurkers (simply browsing through), 9% of them post content once in a while, and 1% participate actively. At CitizenLab, we use design to try to get more people involved.
This starts with an interactive onboarding process. When people sign up to use our platform, we get them to post a first idea. Once people have engaged with the platform once, they are more likely to participate again. Another way we try to increase participation is making sure our platform is inclusive. To help us reach that goal, we follow the Web Accessibility Guidelines which have been studied to meet the needs of individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities. Lastly, we organize user testing nights to help us improve our user experience and further increase our retention rates.
That being said, promoting user participation is a responsibility we share with the governments who use our service. If our data reveals that residents of neighborhood X do not participate on CitizenLab, the government can focus its communication efforts on making sure residents of that neighborhood voice their opinions.
Can you give us some examples of ideas that came to life thanks to CitizenLab?
Our favorite success stories so far happened in Hasselt. The city decided to implement a few ideas suggested by CitizenLab users. One of them is enlarging a park to include a nearby river. Another is setting up modular benches and wifi in the park so people can work outside in the summer.
On your website, you praise Open Public Data (a.k.a. Open Government Data). Can you tell us a bit more about this concept?
Open Public Data is basically freely publishing all the data that governments use daily. For instance, a government could decide to share all its data on bike paths throughout the city. Another example is sharing all council decisions online. This is already being done, but its impact could be amplified by creating an API that would allow developers to directly use this data in their applications and websites in real time. The Flemish government is currently working on this. They call it ‘Open Linked Decisions.’ With this kind of system, people could get notified whenever decisions are made on a topic they care about. This would probably lead to a massive rise in citizen participation.
What are the next steps for CitizenLab?
Our medium-term plan is to go to the Netherlands, which tends to embrace participation, and to France, which is the home of many civic tech initiatives. On the long-term, we’d like to spread to other countries in Europe. Our dream is to become the biggest eDemocracy platform on the continent.
Many thanks to Wietse and Aline for giving us insight into CitizenLab’s journey.
If you’d like to attend an upcoming Umami Talk, please sign up on Meetup. We’d love to see you at Central soon!
