Summary and video recording of 24/4/24 Meet-up!

The second and very cool Community Meet-Up of 2024 is now reviewable in video below (unfortunately due to human errors it misses the first couple of slides, which we will post below.)

The Meet-up was entitled: Use of the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform in Slovenia, and its Challenges. It features a presentation by Maja Cimerman of Danes Je Nov Dan (a Slovenian civic tech organization) about the use by different Slovenian municipalities like Medvode, Hrpelje–Kozina and Maribor, and about the modification of our platform to make it fit the Slovenian citizen participation context.

The Meet-up was attended by 25 government users, developers and other interested people from the CONSUL global community.

Maja and her team at Danes Je Nov Dan have worked with and implemented CONSUL DEMOCRACY in 12 Slovenian municipalities so far:

• These cities have mainly been using the Participatory Budgeting feature of our platform, which of course is a combination of other separate features like the Debate and the Citizen Proposal feature.
• Danes Je Nov Dan has adapted the project submission form with several input fields and specific questions to participants in order to receive more complete project descriptions
• Votes for PB processes are collected both on- and offline. In the latter case these votes (by people who do not wish to vote online) are called ‘digitally assisted transactions’ and are manually added by the municipality.
• Some of the municipalities use the different admin roles and interfaces (like administrator, moderator, evaluator, poll officer, etc.) to keep track of and evaluate the citizen participation processes that happen on the platform. Others do not have sufficient resources or knowledge and ask Danes Je Nov Dan for excel files with all the data instead and evaluate projects based on that.
• The Slovenian platforms includes the so-called Knapsack voting method which is not a yes/no vote, but rather a ‘budget’ of votes which citizens can ‘spend’ on projects until they finish their budget.
• In terms of Project Implementation the Slovenian Consul-platforms show the detailed status of ‘winner’ projects after they have been selected by citizens, including documents, photos, and more.
• In the municipality of Medvode PB started in 2021 when there were 170 projects submitted for a 300.000 euro budget. In 2022 the number of projects was 117. Maja explained this decrease by saying that there was a lot of projects that people had in mind for a long time and finally could share them with the municipality through a platform. Aroun 10-12% of all eligible voters attended the PB vote in both years.

Find the whole presentation here: