Decide Madrid: Proactive communities

A video that explains how Decide Madrid, the city council's platform for citizen participation, assists citizens to coordinate with their communities to create stronger proposals.

As participatory democracy processes spread, the growth of citizen proposals becomes a challenge for advocates, voters, and public managers. It is difficult for people to know if there is already a proposal similar to theirs.

Voters feel overwhelmed by the high amount of proposals. And public managers find it difficult to get an overview of what citizens are demanding. Another problem that arises is the dispersion of the vote between similar proposals, which prevents any of them from reaching the threshold necessary to be considered. Some technologies (natural language processing and graphs) can help overcome this challenge. These tools can automatically identify the topics proposed by citizens, offer an overview, follow their evolution, add proposals for the similarity of their content, find proposals similar to a given one, etc. These tools can be incorporated into information technology to support citizen participation processes.

Source: Decide Madrid

Year of publication: 2020