Description
Representative democracy, as practiced today, is based on the assumption, that citizens cannot or do not wish to participate in everyday social decision-making.This system was created at a time, when technological and logistical conditions made it impossible to involve everyone more than once every 3 to 5 years at the ballot boxes. These conditions are no longer true. Technological development has enabled frequent and direct communication with every citizen. A tool for participatory democracy can now be created, which will enable decision-making by everyone. The tool can be used by a nonprofit to involve it's members or a local municipality to involve it's citizens. The first organisation to use the tool to involve it's 920 members in the management decisions will be the project partner, NGO Estonian Debating Society. Creation and use of the tool will lead to higher participation in social discussion and decisions, because decision-making process will become more participatory and transparent and ultimately, the quality of the decisions will also improve.
Summary of project results
The objective of the project was to create an innovative decisionmaking tool for participative democracy. Primary outcome of the project was the creation of CitizenOS (
http://citizenos.com). Citizen OS is an e-decisionmaking platform for different levels of participative democracy (in communities, municipalities, organisations and the state). It enables participative discussion and voting for groups, where getting everyone together into the same room or online at the same time is not a viable option. Secondary outcome was the team behind CitizenOS, who will continue to develope, market and implement the system after the project period. At least 12 months of further funding has been secured to continue development. Cooperation agreements were established with several organisations and networks (Social Enterprise Network, NENO, Cooperation Assembly), who will be using CitizenOS directly or will be making their own participative democracy tools based on CitizenOS open source code. The final outcome were the launch events of CitizenOS, during which we introduced participative democracy as a concept in addition to providing specific guidance about the tool.
Summary of bilateral results