Irekia Civil Participation and Accountability Website - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

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.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

We are attempting to address the problem of the deep-rooted perception of the difficulty in effectively participating in political life outside electoral processes. Citizens underutilized options such as popular legislative initiatives. Another need not covered by traditional processes was mere consultative participation. There was no open and bi-directional channel to gather citizen opinions on government issues.

Also, there are difficulties on accessing to participatory processes "in person". The configuration of working groups makes it difficult for citizens to freely access these processes, due to physical distance or impossibility of schedules. This face-to-face participation became a real "psychological" brake for certain groups, such as people with disabilities, people belonging to ethnic minorities, etc ...

The Government was aware that citizens want to know firsthand what is being done in politics and want to have the opportunity to express opinions on issues of their interest directly to those who decide. They wanted to do it in an "organized" manner, so that they can mutually support their proposals. For this reason, a web platform was developed under the name Irekia - Open Government (irekia means "open" in Euskara (Basque)), where the activity of the more than 200 people with public responsibilities in the Basque Government. Born on January 2010, one of the pioneers at European level, was aimed to deepen transparency in the administration.

Currently Irekia houses a complete file of each public office, its agenda, the staff under its charge, its budget, its public resolutions and the government program initiatives under its responsibility.

In the new version of Irekia, an accountability section of the Government Program has been included, in which each responsible public office returns to the public in plain language the degree of compliance of the initiatives and policies under its responsibility.

Irekia maintains digital meetings on social networks such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter between government officials and Internet users. In these digital meetings, the ministers and the president respond directly to questions with bigger support among citizens.

Objectives or goals of the innovation

1. Inclusion of groups normally removed from citizen participation.
2. Build a more informed citizen participation
3. Active listening to debates about the Basque political agenda.
4. Serve as leverage to continue leading the Spanish autonomous communities in the rankings as Transparency International
5. Internally strengthen the philosophy of accountability among government positions. Make it accessible to the public.

There are also cases of implementation of Irekia software in America (Carchi region in Ecuador) as well as some more in Spain.

The Basque Country has become part of the local program of the Open Government Partnership, as a joint application of three Institutional levels. Irekia, because of its pioneering nature, has served as a medium of the value proposal that has been translated into the first Basque action plan presented last August.

Irekia must listen to young people to continue contributing public value. Before the end of 2018, it will have developed a participatory process focused on the citizens of the future to discover the keys to the new dialectic that the open government of the future should develop.

Irekia includes solutions aimed at the accessibility of groups with special needs, (news readers, automatic subtitling of videos, pages and newsletter in simple language ...) wants to deepen it by periodically developing Access-Clinics.

We believe that participation should take place as close as possible to the citizen and that technological tools are an important aid, but the main thing remains rooted in public-private collaboration, or "Auzolana" "common good" as the expression in Basque that encourages all the action of the Basque government

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

In the design of the online platform, certain challenges that have been key in its subsequent development were assumed:

1. Rigorous approach to on-line processes in fixed-time phases and results: Presentation / Discussion / Contributions / Conclusions.
2. Public response statistics: each citizen petition initiates a timer in Irekia that publicly indicates the time it takes for the administration to respond.
3. Active listening to this initiative in social networks. These comments are incorporated into the web platform.
4. Measurement of the degree of satisfaction of the answers offered by the Government, via test mails.
5. Transparency in the first person: The government positions are accountable for the degree of compliance with the government program in their own words in an open manner.

What is the current status of your innovation?

The web site is currently immersed in a redesign process, for which it is intended to have, in addition to its regular users, other groups, usually more distant, as people with functional diversity, young people, traditionally away from politics ...

The main lesson learned in these first 9 years, is that citizen participation is already taking place outside official sites. Irekia has evolved from being web-centric, towards more and more multi-channel contents: the contents of the web are aimed to the interest groups where their conversations are.

The new audiences of Irekia know us for a content close to their interests, and therefore we must renew the opportunities for our visitors to repeat visits, offering new government proposals to support, assess or criticize.

In terms of what we are currently working on for the future of Irekia, we are developing with the environment of the Intellectual Disability.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

The design of the Irekia platform, the progress and evaluation of the activities is subject to processes such as the PDCA model: Plan-Do-Check-Ad.

Citizens associations, the infomediary sector, the government's technology company, as well as the responsible positions and officials of the Government's Presidency Department take part in this process.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Irekia reports the government's activity to its more than one million visits per year, and also interacts in networks with nearly 100,000 profiles per year that share, answer and value their contents. (The Basque country has 2.2 million inhabitants)
Infomediary sector that uses Creative Commons By license content it's an important user too.
Government Officials and Civil Servants are beneficiaries of contents that are officially displayed on the Irekia web, (mostly on real time).

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

1. Leadership among the Spanish regions in the Transparency International ranking with 100% of indicators met in 2014-2016. Irekia contributes with an important number of indicators.

2. Response times to citizen requests continue to improve from the beginning. At present the medium response-time is around 5-6 days.

3. Irekia has been growing in traffic since its inception. It currently exceeds one million visits per year. (Population of the Basque Country 2.2 million inhabitants)

4. Irekia has received international recognition, highlights the United Nations Public Service Award in 2015. It also attracted the attention of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Ibero-American General Secretariat, through separate agreements.

5. Publication of Irekia's free software for reuse. Various institutions from different countries have been interested in the Irekia software for their Open Government initiatives.

Challenges and Failures

Challenges

Irekia faces the challenge of improving the connection with citizens. Simplify the language-code to facilitate bidirectionality and interactions.
Including the groups most distant from the consultative and policy-making processes.

Failures

Irekia started this journey with a web-centric strategy. Too many expectations were created around the web. Over the years, web-site activity and contents has been re-oriented towards social networks, closer to the citizen.

Conditions for Success

Leadership and political will.
Support of the infrastructure and information technology area.
Social groups involved in the co-creation of policies.

Replication

The initiative has been replicated in several institutions, the last and paradigmatic case has been El Carchi Regional Government in the north of Ecuador.

We encourage any institution to test the Open Irekia software before developing its Open Government initiatives at this very link (https://www.irekia.euskadi.eus/es/site/page/source_code)

Lessons Learned

We dare to propose a brief decalogue of lessons learned in case they are useful for someone trying to initiate/improve an Open Government project:

1. There is no need to start from scratch. Others have made the mistakes you will make.
2. The government is not the center around which everything gravitates.
3. Citizens are already criticizing us. It is better to listen to them and have the tools to answer them.
4. Sometimes a "I heard you" or "I take note" is better than a "no answer"
5. "Inclusion" is the next revolution in the opening of governments, although it does not sound revolutionary at all.
6. "Accountability" is another revolution if we know how to make it accessible and involve the public.
7. Create Content Continuously, the three C's to generate opportunities for citizen participation. Your proposal has to compete in overcrowded social media.
8. Involve the departments of your government. They already do a lot of participation.
9. Open data: engagement involves visualizations
10. Fail to improve.