Closed Project
09/09/2024 - 09/09/2024
At Platoniq, we’re very excited because we’ve started working on democratic participation. What’s more, we’ve begun this journey alongside an unbeatable partner, Decide Madrid—the Madrid City Council’s participatory project—which is also behind the development of Consul, with versions in more than 30 cities around the world.
The goal is to contribute Platoniq’s expertise in co-creation methodologies and crowdfunding processes to devise improvements for one of Decide Madrid’s specific tools: citizen proposals. This is the platform where Madrid residents can submit specific proposals—ranging from public policy initiatives to concrete suggestions for neighborhood improvements—so that, if they garner the necessary support, they may be adopted by the administration. This is the City Council’s commitment, and so far, only two proposals have succeeded.
Therefore, in partnership with ParticipaLab—MediaLab’s Collective Intelligence Laboratory for Democratic Participation—we have begun working to design two pilot projects that propose improvements to various phases of the proposal process. The first activity, held on December 12, was a workshop with experts in participation and digital platforms. During the workshop, we analyzed the proposal cycle and proposed new phases to promote its success, and we worked together to identify potential users and their motivations for participating in the different phases of a citizen proposal. We also created possible scenarios to develop and validated them with both the workshop participants and the teams from ParticipaLab and Decide Madrid.
As a result of this first initiative, two lines of work have been agreed upon to be developed in the coming months. On the one hand, revitalizing the current community by using strategic communication tools with previously segmented users; and on the other, expanding the reach of citizen proposals beyond the platform.
These two areas of focus will be explored in more detail at the upcoming workshop on February 1 at Medialab, to which you’re invited if you’re interested in either of these two areas of work. In any case, we’ll keep you updated on our progress.
The first approach is based on what we call “progressive engagement,” using gamification mechanics. These mechanics focus on providing incentives to participants in a phased manner—on the one hand, encouraging them to achieve goals, and on the other, rewarding them with new resources once those goals are met. Given the success of crowdfunding—especially in terms of capacity-building and engagement—we aim to apply what we’ve learned from running crowdfunding campaigns on Goteo.org to the Citizen Proposals section of Decide.
