.“Our democracy 2.0 solution provides a simple and engaging way for policy makers to mass crowd-source and solve specific challenges.”
The facts
There is a new era of participation emerging in the society and new Web 2.0 technologies have unleashed the desire to participate deeply in political activity. Politicians and public agents begin to understand how the social fabric of society has radically changed in the last few years from one of centralized control to one of engagement and participation.
People believe that Government and public institutions should be more transparent, participatory and collaborative. In fact, openness will strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government and public institutions. But when it comes to political democracy, we’re all pretty passive. Almost all democratic systems around the world are best described as “broadcast democracies.”
Politicians mostly use the media to broadcast their opinions to citizens, and in the run-up to an election, they buttress these messages with paid advertising. Then the citizens get their one shot at participating in the governing process, i.e., they vote.
After the ballots are cast, voters go back to their passive role as recipients of political messages. Between elections there is no real engagement by the citizens in the important decisions that affect their lives. This “we vote, they rule” system of representative democracy made sense when it was devised centuries ago. Our ancestors didn’t have the education, time, resources, or communication tools to participate in the governing process. They chose their representatives with the expectation that they would learn about issues and make reasoned decisions on the voters’ behalf.
Real, deliberative democracy requires an enhanced notion of citizenship. Policy makers need to provide opportunities for individuals to have their say about political decision-making. It’s not possible anymore to keep describing citizens as “the electorate,” “voters,” and “electors”, because in doing so we reduce citizens to people who execute transactions in a voting booth every two or four years. Surely, citizens could, and should, be involved more deeply in the political life of their country, their city and their neighborhood, to the benefit of all.
But in order to effectively engage citizens, politicians and public institutions need to believe that the voice of citizens matter.
Main Benefits
We believe it will take more than a few Twitter accounts and Blogs to make any difference to the way the government deals with citizens.
Our purpose-built solution for Democracy 2.0 allows you to engage citizens in a variety of consultations, debates, regulation development or deliberations on issues affecting specific communities or society as a whole, giving policy makers a better sense of what is on people’s minds.
It solves the gaps in the Process Governance & provides ownership and control to the Business Process Manager while pleasing IT and senior management.
It also enables you to have a continuous and appealing online presence for citizens, opening up a new channel for participation and contributing to the ongoing dialogue between politics, public institutions and citizens, forging links between them.
Unlike traditional policy-making processes that take place in closed rooms involving a limited number of participants, our solution provides an open forum through which ideas can be shared and debated amongst a much larger group of people. It’s low-barriers to participation ensures people of different internet and subject literacy could take part in the dialogue in different ways, making visible the value of collective knowledge in policy and social problem solving.
Using Innabler’s Democracy 2.0 solution, the cost of running large-scale processes is relatively low, making it possible to scale from 2.000 people to 20.000 people relatively easily, providing good value for money.
And because the results of these capabilities, consultations, debates, regulation development or deliberations can be fed directly into the policy making process it’s great for:
- Understanding priorities
- Knowledge sharing;
- Consulting the hard-to-reach
- Participatory Budgeting
- Generalized visibility on key public issues
- Informed feedback
- Citizen and stakeholder engagement
- Kickstarting debate;
- Public and social engagement with complex issues
Only our solution enables you to design and implement your own Democracy 2.0 best practices. In addition, you can include your guidelines, create default tasks and templates, define evaluation methods and create scorecards. All these features can be customized and linked to multiple pre-defined models.
And you can enjoy simplicity at the start and sophistication only when you need it. You don’t have to use all of its capabilities at the outset. Start simply, explore new capabilities for greater levels of process maturity, according to your strategy and pace of transformation without any kind of new implementation or customization.
Do you still have some doubts? Ask us for more information.
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