Description
The project will enhance e-participation opportunities in Latvia, supplementing traditional forms of participation. Aim: strengthen civic society and participatory democracy, maintain sustainable and qualitative involvement of society in decision making proceses by promoting efficient and productive participation platform ManaBalss.lv. Activities: provide users support, inform the parliament and the public about the meaning and means of participation, improve on-line security, create the OpenSource, attract donations, involve volunteers, participate in NGO cooperation networks. Results: improved quality of published initiatives, available professional support for initiators and users, promoted awareness about meaning and means of participation, increased number of users, secure environment for initiatives provided, donations attracted donations, participation in NGO"Open Internet and Open Democracy". Target groups: website users,voters,NGO members
Summary of project results
The target of Project was to strengthen civic society and participatory democracy; maintain sustainable and qualitative involvement of society in decision making process, by promoting efficiency and productivity of participation platform ManaBalss.lv. As a target group of project were 867,000 users of portal ManaBalss.lv. The target has been achieved by: 1. Providing support for initiators and portal users; 2. Providing the information to Latvian Parliament each time when the initiative reaches 10 000 signatures. Within the project there have been received 418 initiatives; 9 initiatives have reached 10 000 signatures and have been submitted to Parliament; 3. Ensuring the functioning of participation platform, valorisation of good practice- provided technical support; improved the safety of the portal and elaborated Open source that can be used for establishing similar e-democracy tools; 4. Attracting the donations (11 531 times the users of portal have donated); 5. Finding the volunteers (6 volunteers work on the base of contract); 6. Establishing NGO cooperation network "Open Internet and Open Democracy" (6 participants till the end of 2015). The target group is directly involved in the project activities by publishing and supporting (signing) the initiatives. From the beginning of the project, there are 70-85 signatures collected each year (88 881 in 2015). The portal popularity as well as the society participation in the decision making processes has increased- in 2015 the portal hit 1 536 296 views and from the beginning of the project there have been 867 000 unique users. The project has provided a significant media coverage- the portal and separate initiatives have been mentioned in Latvian and other country media at least 407 times (incl.at least 9 foreign articles, 25 video stories and 7 radio stories). All of the project results will be maintained at least 2 years after the final project approval. The project sustainability can be easily evaluated by the active work of the portal after the end of the project. Even there are a lot of new and significant ideas for the further portal development, the project has increased the portal capacity and allowed to reach approximately half of inhabitants in Latvia.
Summary of bilateral results