Case Studies

My Municipality (Meu Município) a free public portal that organizes and makes available the financial performance of 90% of the Brazilian cities in a intuitive, user-friendly way. It is used for citizens to understand, monitor and compare how Brazilian municipalities collect and spend our money. My Municipality is also designed for public managers in their analysis and decision-making about the city's directions.

The Michigan Economic Development Corp (MEDC) teamed up with private partner Patronicity to launch a first of its kind crowd-granting program to help create vibrant communities throughout Michigan. The program revolutionizes the granting process, in part, by making the community the final review committee. If the project garners enough community support through crowdfunding, it will receive a matching grant. With crowdfunding success rates across the industry at around 5-10% for projects…

The reason for the development and launch of our e-solutions was to facilitate the collection of initiatives and proposals to eliminate administrative burdens and review their implementation in one place. Our innovation provides users with an on-line one-stop-shop solution, where they receive all information about activities in eliminating administrative burdens and preparing better legislation, and enables systematic collection, resolution and monitoring of implementation of proposals.

In a context where the channels between institutions and citizens have been broken by corruption, Día Blanco [White Day] is developed to promote bonds of trust and legitimacy among communities. In the last 3 years, more than 35,000 citizens have been mobilized by this innovative experience, which helps social organizations to inform their communities about their management and impact on local development through social accountability exercises.

The Electronic System for the Citizen Information Service (e-SIC) was developed to enable, in a cost-effective and efficient way, the reception and processing of access to information requests. The system facilitated the implementation of the Access to Information Act and serves as an essential tool for monitoring its implementation.

Law nº 12.527/2011, the Access to Information Act, has come to materialize, in practice, transparency mechanisms of public information predicted in the 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution, and in other several international treaties. The Law consolidates the understanding that public information is owned by society, not by public bodies that produce or keep it. Reviewing and improving mechanisms of various processes, such as increasing transparency and knowledge management, were implemented.

Insights.US is a tool that helps governments and cities obtain insights directly from their stakeholders, and update participants on their personal impact on the final decisions. This method makes the public be more engaged in the outcome of public governance.

We the Citizens is a democratic participatory project to ignite citizen involvement in democracy in Ireland. A pilot project found striking shifts in how participants feel about their ability to influence politics. The project tested whether a more participatory form of democracy could work in Ireland at a time when people felt adrift and disconnected from power. In the project, a representative group of citizens were randomly chosen to attend a Citizens’ Assembly in June 2011.

Governments through all over the world are struggling against disaffection from the people. Incapacity to participate in policy-making, it’s a common perception among citizens. Citizens has the right not to participate, but administrations has to ensure the right to get involved in policy-making. IREKIA was the first participation portal in Spanish & Basque languages and it has been made in Open Source Software and in its recent version offers and Government Program public tracking tool.

Better Reykjavik is a co-creation project of the Citizens Foundation, Reykjavik City and its citizens that connects them and improves trust and policy. It’s a platform for crowdsourcing solutions to urban challenges and has multiple democratic functions: Agenda setting, Participatory budgeting and Policymaking. Innovations include unique debating system, crowd-sourcing, submission of multimedia content and extensive use of AI to improve the user experience as well as content submitted.