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COLDIGIT Helsinki Symposium

The COLDIGIT Helsinki Symposium on September 20, 2023, focused on exploring various aspects of collective intelligence and its applications in the public sector, especially concerning digital tools and democratic processes.

COLDIGIT internal workshop (19 September)

The symposium covered various topics on citizen participation, digitalisation, and collective intelligence in the public sector. It was an exceptional opportunity to explore innovative approaches and learn from diverse experiences from Nordic and international cases.

COLDIGIT Helsinki Symposium 20.9 (Round Table Discussion)

We thank our international guests for joining our discussions and providing invaluable insights, enriching the dialogue on citizen participation and digitalisation.

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COLDIGIT project recommendations: Using collective intelligence to transform public institutions

Using collective intelligence to transform public institutions

Link: Nesta (https://www.nesta.org.uk/project-updates/using-collective-intelligence-to-transform-public-instituitions/)
Published: 13 September 2023
Author: Mikko Rask

Over the last three years the COLDIGIT project has examined the application of collective intelligence methods and tools to transform 21st-century public institutions. In this update we share lessons from the three project pilots in Trondheim (Norway), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Helsinki (Finland) and their work on citizens assemblies and participatory budgeting.

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News

NordForsk: Interview of Mikko Rask

Governments and municipalities across the globe are facing a series of crises. How do we deal with them?

Link: NordForsk (https://www.nordforsk.org/news/coldigit)
Published: 30.03.2023

The research project Collective Intelligence through Digital Tools (COLDIGIT) aims to generate new knowledge on innovative digital tools and approaches to help governments manage difficult societal processes in the Nordic Region.

The NordForsk-funded research project COLDIGIT is led by Associate Professor Mikko Rask from the University of Helsinki. He says that the public sector is in a very difficult position right now.

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Collective Intelligence Tools repository

As digital technology develops, there is an increasing demand for public organisations to employ digital tools to facilitate citizen participation in policy-making processes. The rise of Civictech and GovTech markets reflects this trend. Nevertheless, public managers, especially at the municipal level, face difficulties choosing the right digital tools due to the fragmented digital ecosystem and complex technologies. Few digital tool repositories exist that could help public managers (except PeoplePowered’s Digital Participatory Platforms).

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News

Three case studies published

Proposal meeting in Biskopsgården, 4th March 2022 (CC-BY Digidem Lab)

COLDIGIT has published three new reports describing the case studies of democratic innovations. The first case describes the implementation of participatory budgeting (PB) in Helsinki, a broad and lengthy process open to the entire city. The second case is about PB in Gothenburg, but there, it is a public housing company that implements it, in two of the most stigmatized residential areas in the city. The third case describes a Citizen’s assembly, carried out in Trondheim, with the intention of getting residents’ views on the new master plan.

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Discussions

The role of digital technology in democratic innovation

Christopher Edgar / Senior researcher, NESTA

In recent years, there has been an increasing desire to enhance the democratic process and make it more accessible to citizens. In the UK for example, recent findings indicate that 77% of the general public believe that local residents should have a say in determining how government funds are utilised within their respective communities. These findings support a broader global trend, with one study reporting that 56% of people surveyed across 17 advanced global economies believe there should be major or complete reform of their political systems. There is a clear demand for democratic reform, and this demand has led to the development of a number of tools and platforms that facilitate citizen participation and engagement in democratic innovations such as citizens assemblies and participatory budgeting initiatives.

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New article “Learning through online participation: A longitudinal analysis of participatory budgeting using Big Data indicators”

We are excited to publish a new article that analysed the democratic quality of online deliberation using Big Data indicators in two rounds of OmaStadi, a participatory budgeting project led by the City of Helsinki, Finland. Our main contribution is to propose online and Big data-based monitoring indicators as a tool for learning and improving democratic innovations that are increasingly iterated along with a policy cycle.

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News

COLDIGIT presented at Decidim Fest

Decidim is one of the biggest open source digital democracy platforms currently in use. Over one hundred cities across the world are using Decidim for a variation of citizen participation processes. The management and development of the platform is run by a democratic association, Meta Decidim, where members together prioritize what features they want to improve or develop next. In the Nordics, several cities in Finland, Sweden and Norway have strarted using the platforrm to run participation processes such as participatory budgeting, participatory urban planning and citizen proposals. Every year Decidim Fest is organized in Barcelona, the birth place of Decidim.

This year the COLDIGIT team were invited to present our work at the conference. Under a hybrid meeting form, much like the platform itself that facilitates both digital and face to face participation, we presented our work together with the municipality of Trondheim, one of our partners. We talked about the overall mission of our project and shared some of our findings so far. Our session was joined by representatives showcasing examples from the EU-commission, French parliament and Swiss municipalities. Among the other attendees were also representives for example Japan, the US and Dakar.

Taking part in the international digital democracy community is key for us as we intend for our research to build on a wider network of knowledge and needs. During the upcoming year alone we are going to study and interact with over one hundred user cases and tools, create a framework to measure participation through barriers and enablers and test new innovative approaches together with Nordic municipalities and public institutions. Stay tuned, as we will share more of our discoveries together with you. Feel free to get in contact if you have questions about our work (Mikko Rask, mikko.rask(at)helsinki.fi).

This post was written by Sanna Ghotbi from Digidem Lab.

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News

The Quest for Efficient Deliberation and Proximity Democracy

The Quest for Efficient Deliberation and Proximity Democracy: The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Helsinki

All over the world, citizens have a say on how their hometowns focus parts of their budgets. Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation for urban development also in Helsinki, where the process is called OmaStadi. With direct democracy, online democracy and co-creation as their assets, the local people had a chance to debate, discuss and vote for the allocation of 4,4, million euros in 2018-2020. In our academic evaluation report, we analyse the OmaStadi process using versatile methods and sources. The end result is an overall evaluation of success, lessons learned and recommendations.

Read the article by Pekka Tuominen, Mikko Rask and Titiana Ertiö in EuropeNow

https://www.europenowjournal.org/issues/issue-41-may-2021/

 

Final evaluation report:

https://bibu.fi/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/BIBU_OmaStadi_English.pdf