Citizen Engagement for Modern Society

Modern communications technology is an empowering force for cities and citizens to design the future of their communities together. And it should be utilized.

In our modern world current citizen engagement practices are increasingly ineffective. Historically, it was common for municipalities to have town hall gatherings and for communities to revolve around a market square. Today the world is a much different place. Most people don’t go to town hall meetings and market squares are not what they once were. Municipalities are finding themselves reassessing what citizen engagement means in a modern digital world.

People At the Core

Cities, by and large, want to get input from the people that live in the city. The promelm lies in doing that effectively.

That is where new tech startups, like Future Dialog, are playing a role. By putting the city engagment concept into a mobile app so that it can be in every residents pocket. The idea is that the city can reach out to the residents and get their input just by publishing questions direcly to people in the city’s “engagement app”.

It is not a world changing concept unto itself, but it is a new way to involve people in shaping their own communities. The idea is about putting people at the core of development, at the center of decision making, and at the heart of local issues.

Civic Participation Made Easy

People have busy active lives which makes participation extremely difficult. The fact of the matter is that local civic participation, for the average person, is nowhere close to being a priority, people are busy and civic participation requires too much time, too much effort, and there is too little reciprocation.

The vision mobile citizen engagement is that residents and community members will be a little more empowered in having their voices heard beyond periodic voting. And city administrators can have quantifiable opinions from more then just a few people.

Everyone has a role to play, a capacity to share insights, and a duty to make their cities better places to live. Bring citizen engagement onto a mobile platform is about making it more accessable.

Want to see how this idea works in practice? More stories coming soon!

Also see FutureDialog