What is Civocracy, anyway?

Our vision for citizen engagement.

Civocracy was conceptualised, created, and built as a civic network that would act as the one place where citizens throughout the world could become involved and active in the decisions that affected them, on all levels.

Let’s take a random citizen. We’ll call him James. James lives in the city of Paris. He’s also an inhabitant of Ile-de-France. He’s a French citizen. He’s European.

It is extremely difficult for James to understand which administrative level is responsible for taking care of each project in the spaces he occupies: who deals with waste schedules, or motorway maintenance, or interest rates?

Do you know who’s responsible?

It’s our mission to ensure citizens’ voices are heard by the right people, the people who make decisions on their behalf. We simplify participation, weaving it effortlessly into the day-to-day fabric of lives, and ensuring that we offer an education so citizens can learn more about local projects, and who is responsible for them.

On the Civocracy platform, each city, region and organisation has its own space; but we have only one citizen community, and this community is able to interact with each and every one of these decision makers in a simple, effective way in one place. Citizens, like James, are notified when new discussions that are relevant to them open, and they then have the chance to make real impact. James can see when his comments have been read by decision makers, and will be notified if his input helps form policy.

We cross borders and break silos. It is fundamental for citizens to embrace participation and the power of their voices.

We simply offer a neutral civic tool that allows for constructive and transparent outcomes for the benefit of the wider community.

This is why when a citizen, like James, registers on the Civocracy platform, he automatically follows all the active cities and organisations that make decisions that affect him.

He knows he is a global citizen, on a global platform, helping make decisions across cities.

If James were to login to Civocracy today, he could agree with other citizen feedback on the reformed education policy in Ville de Lyon and help to restructure the timings of schools’ extracurricular activities, give feedback on different noises in the Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur and how they can be prevented so he can help reduce noise pollution, and suggest how the people of Auvergne Rhône-Alpes can begin producing 50% of the energy they use. Each of these separate government offices benefits from James’ perspective, and the knowledge he brings from having lived and worked in different cities. It gives them the opportunity to create impactful policies and projects in a constructive and transparent way.

Together, James and these governmental decision makers can change communities for the better.

We don’t focus on international debate or local disputes: each Civocracy discussion is independent of political arguments. We have created something far more powerful.

We have created an engaged, cross-country network of people interested in improving communities, on both sides of the table.