2018 in review

It’s the 26th week of the year, which means we’re officially half way through 2018.

6 min readJun 28, 2018

At Civocracy, we keep catching ourselves say that we can’t believe how quickly time has flown, so we thought we’d take three steps backwards to reflect on the first half of the year. It’s been quite the journey…

Government co-creation projects

We’ve been inspired by our clients’ determination to reconnect with their citizens.

This January, following a very productive consultation on the structure of school weeks last autumn and winter, Ville de Lyon took six concrete decisions based on the inputs of their community. These included:

Lengthened break times for students to increase their concentration and creativity
Addition of extracurricular activities run by external organisations
Improved teacher-student ratios during extracurricular activities

A full report can be found here.

French Guiana, a region of France located on the South American continent, launched the États Généraux de la Guyane consultation. This is a 30-year project that will allow the regional assembly and citizens to debate and co-create initiatives that will positively impact the region.

We visited French Guiana in April, and hosted a number of workshops. We found the session on internal change management and collaboration, as well as the workshop on how to structure a discussion for citizens, to be exceptionally productive.

We undertook a deep-dive citizen-participation diagnosis with Sicoval to identify the ways government could improve their stakeholder engagement, and to become more transversal in their working methods. Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes launched their SRADDET-related project, in which they’re generating a new territorial strategy. This strategy will be fully defined by 2019, and then implemented before 2030: they’re looking to identify the factors (infrastructure, landscapes, climate, services, etc) that make territories attractive to — or discourage — newcomers and entrepreneurs.

We’ve visited Monheim Am Rhein and Strasbourg to get them up and running on the platform. Monheim will be gathering citizen propositions to understand their community and sculpt policy based on citizen sentiment — and we were thrilled that the mayor joined our training day! Strasbourg will be consulting their community on education reform, after the French government decentralised rulings on the subject last year.

We are excited to be working with some new governments, and to launch dozens of new citizen consultations! La Rochelle will be focusing on creating a zero-carbon environment, and Beaupreau-en-Mauges will work to collaboratively sculpt the identity of the 24,000-inhabitant city, which has only recently been formed. Plus, we’re starting work with the French national government: keep your eyes on the Civocracy platform…

International debate

Another huge highlight for us was the Friends of Europe’s online brainstorm, Debating Security Plus. For 48 hours, the Civocracy platform was ablaze with international experts from Doctors without Borders, CNN, NATO and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, amongst others. Discussions were held on a range of pressing security topics, and we were blown away by the level of contributions.

Check out the official report from last year’s event. The report for 2018 will be published in September.

Platform redesign

Ahead of Debating Security Plus, the Civocracy platform underwent a redesign. UX has been significantly improved, and we’ve added a number of new features, such as real-time discussion statistics for government, discussion perspectives (filtering by keyword, theme or participant), enhanced user profiles, and notifications.

Citizen-participation advisory services

We’ve spent a lot of time developing our advisory services, and were excited to launch our webinar series.

“Civocracy’s webinars are a powerful tool to fight against the loneliness of the public-sector workers involved in citizen participation. What particularly stood out to us was that we could discuss issues between French Guiana, Paris and other cities on the European continent simultaneously. To have so many different, distant territories, which face similar challenges, exchange ideas together was heartwarming.”
voxe.org

We loved hosting with our partners Voxe and Visions. Voxe spoke on the importance of offline participation to accompany online methods, and Visions tackled the topic of GDPR and data privacy compliance.

Our next session is on digital inclusion.

Events

Last week, along with our friends at polyteia.org, we launched Berlin’s first GovTech meetup! For the first event, we focused on software solutions for better governance, and welcomed Dr. Sebastian Meier — the lead Data Scientist at Technology Foundation Berlin — and Andrej Safundzic — the founder of Tech4Germany — as speakers.

We hope to see you at the next event — we’ll be announcing the topic soon!

We’ve been jetting all across Europe for some of the continent’s best tech conferences. We spoke on civic engagement at Smart City UK, held a fireside chat about responsible investing at the launch of Leapfunder Berlin, joined a panel on CivicTech at Salon des Maires d’Ile-de-France, and pitched at Wolves Summit. We welcomed 15 participants for a workshop on AI and blockchain for citizen participation during Startup Safari, and gave a keynote for French Tech Berlin.

We demoed the platform at the CUBE Tech Fair, pitched at both VivaTech and GovTech.Pioneers, and spoke on the pitfalls of digital democracy at the German-French Young Leaders conference. Plus we hosted our first press conference in Paris, to showcase the launch of our advisory services.

Press

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve been sharing our passion for co-creation.

Benjamin Snow, our CEO, wrote on the need for digitalisation within government.

“Technology has given us an expectation of immediacy and curation.”
Benjamin Snow

Co-founder Chloé Pahud spoke to Le Monde about the ways in which millennials imagine the future, and talked to Le Magazine Europe Parlementaire on the importance of CivicTech and how to foster adoption of this technology within government.

“Civocracy is revolutionary for public debate.”
Le Magazine Europe Parlementaire

Our Head of Communications, Emily McDonnell, wrote on co-creation, democracy and sustainable development, and contributed to co-matter’s report on the state of communities.