Increasing citizen and association involvement in government decision-making by implementing civic engagement platforms: Valencia City case study

Abstract

Civic engagement is believed to be one principle requirement in successful governmental decision making and in turn in realizing deliberation and democracy (Peña-Lopez, 2017; Irvin and Stansbury, 2004). In this study, a state-of-the-art investigation was executed among five civic engagement platforms to decide on the most suitable platform to start building the prototype for the use case of Valencia. The selection was based on the comparison matrix of the specifications elicited from technical project requirements, user suggestions through a survey and a participatory workshop; and adaptability criteria. The selected platform “Communecter” was developed, implemented and deployed on the internet for the validation part for which evaluators from the students of the international master of peace, conflicts and development studies were invited for a validation participatory workshop. Results from the first survey and participatory workshop emphasised the importance of the discussion availability through the platform, possibility of displaying volunteering opportunities and organizing events among a bigger set of functions that are available in the selected platform. The results of the validation show that the current civic engagement platform is a good environment for pursuing civic activities by citizens and associations despite the technical improvements needed and the usability issues. The platform furthermore should be supplemented with other non-technological procedures that will tackle other concerns raised during the study’s participatory workshops including motivation and social & age divide.