Changing Brussels in 3 months
We might be talking about you here… Here’s a story about how YOU can make your city a better place.
Across the globe, we’re seeing a wave of citizen-led initiatives that are becoming a driving force for positive disruptions. Digital democracy, bottom-up collaborations, CivicTech, open data (just to name a few) are the rising forces all around. The rise of this bottom-up approach is an outcome of the crucial political, environmental and economical challenges we face today.
However, these challenges are complex and systemic by nature and demand a new set of approaches and collaborations. The existing models and processes adopted by governments and private actors, remain to be the traditional top-down models.
On the other hand, in the last few years, several bottom-up organisations rose to address some of the crucial challenges of today through concrete projects and active movements. Nevertheless, the impact on cities remains low due to the isolated and disconnected nature of these initiatives. The citizens who are at the core of these problems and solutions remain either passive or dis-empowered to contribute to the change.
What is required today is an unprecedented collaboration among all the stakeholders of our society to work together on a common goal. And this remains the driving force behind civic innovation network.
To start with, we want to gather the opinions of citizens of Brussels on the city challenges as well as map the creative solutions offered by the city. Cities across the world are experimenting with digital strategies for citizen engagement, but what are the best approaches to enable a genuine citizen empowerment?
Often, during a digital engagement campaign for citizens the reach is limited to a niche audience — political activists or campaign groups. In other cases the reach is so widely expanded that it is difficult to handle or to make sense of the collected responses.
Also there are limitations on putting into practice the best responses due to the lack of support from governments and the lack of financial resources.
The bigger picture here is that we need a grounded strategic plan to give a concrete impact to citizen engagement campaigns. A plan that entails an empowering democratic experiment by reaching out to wider audience and combined with offline gatherings; connecting the citizen voices with public and private organisations to gather structural support and linking it to the creative communities of the city to scale up the solutions.
With this plan and vision, civic innovation network is happy to present you the launch of OpenWall, a crowdsourcing platform for citizen issues.
What is OpenWall?
OpenWall, is an online platform run by citizenlab and managed by civic innovation network. It is a three-month campaign to gather the voices of citizens of Brussels on the issues the city is facing as well as to put a priority on the urgent needs that require an innovative solution.
The online campaign is reinforced with a series of weekly offline events supported by bottom-up organisations of Belgium. The whole campaign is organised around nine topics with one week dedicated to one topic. During each week, one topic will be addressed through crowdsourcing issues on OpenWall, one offline event and content curation with a specific hashtag on our social media.
We invite you to go on board the platform and start crowdsourcing the challenges you think are crucial to the city of Brussels. It has a very quick login process and will take you 5 minutes to join the wall. Two words of advice: before submitting an idea, please ensure the idea has not been submitted before and try to be as exhaustive as possible. This will prompt others to debate on your idea and give their vote.
Here is a short tour of the platform with its key features:
Multilingual interface
When you arrive on the platform the first language is English, however you can choose the translation in French or Dutch.
Topic-wise filtering
There are nine topics that are being discussed on the OpenWall and you can filter the conversation with the topic of your interest. Once you are on the dashboard of a specific topic, you can view all the issues (one issue is represented by one card) raised by citizens under that topic as well as submit an issue yourself.
Trending discussions
The cards that are the most discussed or receives many votes appear under the trending section on the landing dashboard of the wall. This allows you to get on-board the highly discussed card as well as overview the most crucial issues of your city.
Upvote or downvote a card
You can get your voice heard by voting on a card. This will help us to prioritise the most crucial issues that needs to be tackled.
Geotagging commune by commune
A map allows you to tag issues and search for others depending the commune they come from, or where they are the most present.
What happens next?
The crowdsourcing on OpenWall will run until end of March along with weekly offline events. We will simultaneously analyse the collected data and synthesize it in powerful visuals that represent the most important challenges, the most discussed topics and the nature of citizen participation. After the OpenWall phase we will launch a call for civic innovators in Brussels who have an innovative solution and can solve the identified most crucial challenges of our city. At the same moment, we are talking to several public and private organisations who can join the network and support implementation of solutions.
Do you think Brussels can be improved in a specific domain or needs an urgent solution for a crucial problem? Do you know change-makers or project builders shaping solutions in your area? Are you one?
Article written by Khushboo Balwani.
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