Lisbon was selected as a pilot site, it was envisioned as a good case to innovate their PB process with an online platform and a multichannel approach. It was expected that the experimentation in a capital like Lisbon would make the EMPATIA platform very visible to other cities in Portugal and so on.
Problems and Purpose
At the point when Lisbon was selected as a pilot site, it was envisioned as a good case to innovate their PB process with an online platform and a multichannel approach. These objectives changed in the course of the project, focusing on integration of different online participation offers in one single platform rather than on the innovation of the PB process.
When the EMPATIA project was started in 2016, Lisbon already had eight years of PB, offering a good institutional scenario. The design of Lisbon’s platform was conditioned by the fact that the Municipality previously bought a specific platform to manage the PB process. In that perspective, the purpose of EMPATIA changed from providing a PB platform to fostering the creation of a participation system for Lisbon that was going to bring together, in the same virtual space, the different participation tools available, while assuring the interconnection with PB (the other platform acquired by the Municipality). [1]
As part of the planning process, a number of goals and requirements from the side of the city of Lisbon were identified:
1) Creating a centralized municipal participation portal In order to support the city’s strategy of coherent participation strategy, the two main goals were: organizing the municipal participation tools in a coherent and integrated way, ensuring the collaboration of the different municipal services; making available the citizen participation tools in a single online platform. Underlying these two goals was the municipality’s objective to create a unified municipal participation policy more integrated and comprehensive, supported by different mechanisms of interaction with citizens. In this way, the municipality aimed at strengthening the process of opening up to citizens, modernizing services, making municipal management and the definition of public policies more democratic. Moreover, increasing the transparency of the municipality’s activities and the accountability of the elected body by rearranging and adding information in the several pages and platforms identified to be part of the new portal.
2) Developing a continuous participation tool for citizen ideas (LisBOAideia): besides the need for a participation portal, the city of Lisbon asked for the development of a continuous participation tool (later named LisBOAideia), to be designed in conjunction with the PB, with the objective of creating a participation channel for small proposals, up to 50.000 Euros, removing those proposals from the PB, where they cannot compete with larger ones. Two goals were expected to be achieved with the introduction of such a new channel for participation: on the side of citizens, the aim was to create a space for small ideas which can have a high impact on the city but are not able to compete with the big budget proposals submitted in the PB process. Yet, on the municipal side, the aim was to reduce the total number of proposals received in their PB process, thus reducing the number of proposals that municipal services have to analyse technically.
3) Offering thematic consultations: the municipality also expressed the wish to be able to conduct voluntary thematic online consultations as an addition to the ones they are obliged to conduct by law. The goal was thus to extend consultations to other processes, policies or projects, not mandatory by law, contributing to a greater democratization of municipal management.
The Lisbon pilot was originally set to test “participation”, “transparency” and “online/offline integration” with the implementation of the platform in the management of the PB process. It would allow to improve the technical analysis process by providing greater transparency and involving citizens in the decision of merging projects during this phase. The vote system would be improved by integrating channels and making them more transparent and accessible to participants. It was also intended to improve the implementation cycle by increasing the transparency, creating an information system and involving citizens. With the creation of the participation system it was possible to maintain the objectives although with different approaches. In other words, the objectives to test with Lisbon pilot were: Participation; Efficiency; Transparency; Integration.
The objective “participation” allowed the creation of a municipal participation policy that could reach more citizens by providing different channels of participation in the different areas of the municipal activity.
The objective “efficiency” refers to the goal of optimizing the investment of time and resources by facilitators and technical staff, as well as citizens. It was suspected that building a participation system for Lisbon with a Single Sign On feature would allow citizens to participate in an easier way and also municipal technical staff to monitor the development of the process with more effectiveness. Exploring synergies between the PB process and the newly created continuous ideation tool LisBOAideia could help reduce the number of small budget projects in the PB process, therefore reducing the workload of the municipal services in the technical analysis phase.
The objective of ‘transparency” stands for ensuring clear and simple information on all stages and participation tools integrated in the platform. This could be achieved by creating communication channels that would work both for participants and the team that manages the processes, as well as building a history of information.
Lastly, the objective of “integration” refers to the broader strategy to promote citizen participation, which includes other tools for interaction between society and the municipality. When the project started, Lisbon already had those other tools, although they were lacking that integration, uniformity and common identity to be perceived as a municipal participation policy more integrated and comprehensive. [2]
Background History and Context
Besides being the capital of Portugal, Lisbon is also the most important city in the country with experience in the development of different participation processes. Over the years, PB’s methodology has changed, mainly regarding the ideation phase - where citizens can submit their proposals - and the voting phase. Although there have been face-to-face moments, Lisbon has been privileging online participation mechanisms.
Information and Communication Technologies provided an opportunity for participation in Lisbon, but also generated other problems, such as: i) increased individualism as participants were not required to discuss the common good; ii) although it had the potential to reach more people it normally leaves out those that have lower academic qualifications and/or are digitally excluded; iii) made the evaluation of the process harder due to the difficulty of extracting data from participants (it is difficult to understand the profile of the participant such as education, age, sex, for example).
The idea was thus to find solutions for these problems with the help of EMPATIA. Moreover, due to the size of its technical and political structure (around 8 thousand employees), Lisbon offered a significant challenge to the design and testing of the platform, especially because of the need to involve very different services that are not always used to working together. Even though the focus of the pilot shifted away from the original reasons for selection that were focused on PB, Lisbon remained a valuable pilot partner throughout the project. It enabled to test the platform in a large capital city, with a focus on flexibility and multichannel integration. [3]
Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities
Lisbon’s PB process completed 10 years of existence in 2017. Before EMPATIA, it was the only tool listed under the domain “Lisboa Participa - www.lisboaparticipa.pt”. The purpose of the project was to use that domain as an aggregator of all participation tools and not only PB. Its portal remains the same as it was before, although it was given a different URL: https://op.lisboaparticipa.pt/home. It is a process based on two cycles, the budget definition and implementation.
The budget definition cycle has 6 phases: Proposals submission, online through the platform or in presence in one of the participatory assemblies; Technical feasibility analysis by the municipality services; Provisional Results and Complaint; Voting, online through the platform, SMS or in presence; Public Presentation of Winning PB Projects; Analysis, evaluation and preparation of the next edition. The implementation phase occurs during the following year. The pot of money allocated for PB is 2.5 million of Euros. [4]
To build a participation system for Lisbon, it was crucial to create a common identity. It was not sufficient to link all participation tools and pages in one portal. It was necessary to demonstrate to citizens there was a reason why they were all aggregated under the label of “Lisboa Participa”. This was the reason why the design for the Lisbon pilot could not be the standard EMPATIA one and had to be custom made. [5]
Participant Recruitment and Selection
The total of participants were 1855. In Lisbon we collected data at the registration of the participants through the site www.lisboaparticipa.pt, based on EMPATIA code, and managed directly by the partners INLOCO and ONE. The registration procedure has been changing along the pilot, and in an initial stage it was allowed also to unidentified participants to submit proposals and preferences. Therefore, the number of missing value for this case is high, and only 30% of participants completed their profile. In order to complement this lack of data, additional demographic information have been requested to users in the final questionnaires distributed throughout the network of LisboaParticipa. [6]
Lisboa Participa (participation portal)
Between the 10th of March and the 30th of November, 2017, the platform was visited 18.710 times.
There were 1.843 registered users on the platform.
65.799 page views (of them 36.913 unique page views) were registered in that period.
The average time spent on the website was 5 minutes and 34 seconds.
LisBOAideia (part of Lisboa Participa portal)
From March 10 till December 31 of 2017, 140 ideas and 128 comments were submitted by 94 users.
The total number of votes in the ideas submitted were 1.706 (1.578 were positive votes and 119 negative), by a total of 836 participants.
Thematic Consultations (part of Lisboa Participa website)
The consultation for the revision of PB rules received 16 contributions.
The consultation regarding Lisbon European Sports Capital 2021 received 10 responses.
A third consultation is ongoing since the 14th of December till the 28th of February of 2018, about “Praça de Espanha”. This is an historical square of great importance for the city of Lisbon. Citizens are invited to give their opinion about the nine possible projects for that area. [7]
Methods and Tools Used
Technology/ Tools
Based on the requirements and goals formulated by Lisbon Municipality, the decision was taken to build a comprehensive participation portal unifying all existing participation tools in one single platform, and to add two new participation tools, one for thematic consultations and one for continuous idea collection with the help of EMPATIA.
The different existing participation tools were analysed in order to decide which ones should be part of the concept for the city. Besides the development of a portal to integrate different existing participation tools, EMPATIA was used to test new tools, directly built into the platform to tackle existing gaps and expand the options that citizens could use to participate. The portal aggregates the following new and existing participation tools:
A) New Participation tools:
1. Thematic Consultations – A space dedicated to all consultations that are not compulsory by law, but that the Lisbon City Council considers essential to in order to collect opinions and other contributions from citizens about specific topics.
2. LisBOAideia – A space to submit ideas for Lisbon designed as a continuous ideation process. The submitted ideas stay in public debate and can be commented by other participants. After the voting and debate period that all ideas are entitled to, Lisbon Municipality makes a decision on the feasibility of its implementation.
B) Existing Participation tools:
3. Public Consultations – A space dedicated to the investment projects of the municipality of Lisbon, which are required by law to a public consultation process (DL No. 154/2013, 05 November). All municipalities in Portugal and other political bodies and organizations (central and local administrations) are required to do this process for all major investment projects.
4. “Fix My Street” – This tool is named in Portuguese “Na Minha Rua”, it was an existing open-source citizen feedback platform, now embedded in EMPATIA.
5. “Participatory Budgeting” - the Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a form of citizen participation in the governance of the city of Lisbon. Through the PB, people have real power to decide on a portion of the municipal budget. Citizens may submit proposals to the city and vote the projects they want to see included in the Plan of Activities and Budget of the City of Lisbon the following year.
6. “Open Lisbon” – This portal is the result of the effort of Lisbon Municipality to implement its policy of open data, and therefore has been developing initiatives in this area, providing data produced by the city that can be accessed, used, modified and shared by any person or entity, without restrictions of use.
Since the official launch of the platform (10th of March of 2017) till June 2017, “Lisboa Participa” was structured in the following way:
Three participation tools:
- Participatory Budgeting
- LisBOAideia
- Fix My Street
Two main participation areas:
-Lisbon in Debate: Includes public consultations (required by law), thematic consultations and other useful information regarding the activity of the municipality;
-Open Lisbon: Open data portal of the city, where data sets produced by municipal services and by partner entities that operate in the city are available.
In May of 2017, Lisbon Municipality requested to add a new participation area to the platform named “Citizenship Forum”. After its implementation, the platform displays a structure based on three participation tools and areas. [8]
What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation
Design Process
Within the tools of participation, those that already existed but that were dispersed, in different portals and managed by different services, were identified. New tools of participation were also created with the aim of strengthening the municipal policy of citizens’ involvement in the management of public policies.
This initiative, was in a first phase of conceptual nature, in so far as the objective was to create a system of participation that responded to the different needs of citizens, allowing a link between services and policies. Secondly, a political negotiation of the participation system was required with the elected executive, who essentially accepted the proposal presented by the EMPATIA team. Thirdly, the training of the technical services of Lisbon Municipality was assured by OneSource, so that they could assume the management of the platform.
Moreover, a work of technical assistance to Lisbon Municipality was maintained. At the same time, new participation tools are being designed, which, starting in 2018, will increase the system created. Citizens were not directly involved in the design of the platform, but their views were considered by the team (participation department of Lisbon, In Loco), namely on the weaknesses of the municipality's participation tools and on the evaluation of the platform.
Those views, collected over the years through the PB process, were very helpful in helping the team designing the model of the participation system. For the later stage of the pilot implementation, regarding WP4 activities, the survey designed for all pilots, was incorporated in the platform allowing to collect citizen’s opinions and test the questionnaire module. In Loco and OneSource agreed at the beginning of the project to ensure the presence of both institutions in the working meetings with the municipality of Lisbon.
In Loco was mainly responsible for conceptual and political assistance to the Municipality. OneSource followed all this work, supporting with its technological know-how and the way a model of participation could be implemented via the platform. In summary, the design of the Participation System of Lisbon, from now on referred as “Lisboa Participa” was a long process throughout the year of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, in which several meetings were conducted between EMPATIA partnership and political and technical staff from the municipality.
The launch of the platform, took place on the 10th of March of 2017, based on the “World Café” methodology. During the event, the collaboration protocol between Lisbon Municipality and EMPATIA consortium was signed. After the formal proceedings, the attendants were invited to interact with the different tools through several terminals arranged for that effect. [1]
Budgeting Cycle
It is a process based on two cycles, the budget definition and implementation. The budget definition cycle has 6 phases:
1)Proposals submission, online through the platform or in presence in one of the participatory assemblies;
2) Technical feasibility analysis by the municipality services;
3) Provisional Results and Complaint;
4) Voting, online through the platform, SMS or in presence;
5) Public Presentation of Winning PB Projects;
6) Analysis, evaluation and preparation of the next edition. [9]
Monitoring Cycle
With Lisbon, the EMPATIA platform focused on testing integration as well as the development and management of the tools LisBOAideia and Thematic Consultations. The time spent in the negotiation and development of the features and the date set for the launch of the platform left a short period of time for tests. Only with usage and intensive testing, it has been possible to improve issues and understand what works best.
Since the implementation of Lisboa Participa, 115 issues/requests have been registered on the Google shared document created by OneSource, 56 were related to LisBOAideia, 41 to Lisboa Participa as a whole, 8 were related to thematic consultations, 2 to the open data section, and 2 to Fix My Street. [10]
Deliberation Cycle
The EMPATIA platform made possible the integration of the following participation tools that had different URL’s and are now listed as Lisboa Participa subpages, with the exception of PB7: “Fix My Street”, “Open Lisbon”, “Lisbon in Debate”, “Citizenship Forum” and Participatory Budgeting.
The platform, through the use of technical features and a design that provides uniformity and a common identity, is structured in a user-friendly manner. The main menu is composed of six menu items – PB, LisBOAideia, Fix My Street, Lisbon in Debate, Open Lisbon and Citizenship Forum - and at the same level the button to login and register. Lisboa Participa is available in three languages: Portuguese, English and French.
The requirements gathering process and planning process occurred during 2016 and the first trimester of 2017. Benefiting from the fact that both WP2 leader OneSource and In Loco were based in Portugal, all the process was accompanied by both. This fact made possible to provide direct personal feedback to Lisbon about the technical feasibility of a specific methodological requirement, as well as the information needed by OneSource from Lisbon services in order to make the implementation. After the requirements gathering and planning process was completed, the communication with OneSource was related to managing the performance of the platform, solving issues and bugs derived of the implementation of the features reported by Lisbon Municipality and In Loco. In order to keep this process relatively easy, OneSource created a shared Google document in order to register all the issues, level of priority and status (fixed or in process). The dialogue between the entities was done through several means of communication: e-mail, telephone, in presence and occasionally by WhatsApp. [11]
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
Lisbon has a long history of participation. In fact, their PB process started in 2008. In the process several participation, e-government and open data tools were created. The result was a fragmentation of tools, portals and websites that were not linked or unified. Each of them required a different authentication process that in the end was an obstacle to citizen participation. The solution of EMPATIA has enabled a new vision for public participation in Lisbon, with the integration of participation and the revitalization of the participation portal “Lisboa Participa”. This inevitably brought significant gains for Lisbon, such as:
- Reinforcing visibility and public statement;
- Conceptual and functional integration of tools;
- Possibility to have (or to reach) a Single Sign On;
- Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of information.
The most innovative aspects of Lisboa Participa were the integration of all the available participation tools providing them a common identity, uniformity and clarification of their purpose all in the same space. This process has enabled the implementation of the Single Sign On - even though only partially - which represents something that was never tried before by the municipality. It also expanded participation, creating new forms of involvement of citizens that previously did not exist (LisBOAideia and thematic consultations).
EMPATIA has created channels of communication within the participation tools for users and the management team. For example, a user that submits an idea through LisBOAidea can easily communicate with the management team by sending a message through the platform and vice-versa. LisBOAideia also took advantage of certain trendy features used in social media, by offering citizens an easy way to express if they agree or not with a certain idea, with the likes and dislikes type of voting. [12]
In Lisbon, the team explored the engagement capability of multiple parallel channels of engagement, showcasing that multiplying the channel of engagement does not appear to promote significantly inclusion. [13]
Analysis and Lessons Learned
One of the most important lessons learned through the collaborative development and implementation process is that testing is very important and there is the necessity to have time to do it. Many of the issues could have been avoided if there was enough time to test the functionalities, page and information display, the back office and the information flows generated within the process. Although in a testing environment it’s difficult to identity or foresee all that can happen, it is an important exercise that allows to understand and fix some problems.
Although there were many things to fix and many requests from Lisbon Municipality side, OneSource managed to make sure they were properly addressed and resolved as quickly as possible. The system implemented to report issues using a shared Google document proved to be very useful. It was set to explain in detail what was the problem and the level of priority. All occurrences had to provide the following information: which tool it was related to; brief description of task or problem; back office, front office related or both; level of priority; person that reported; date of report; expected date of resolution; date in which it was developed; date it was tested and comments. In conclusion, issues and bugs probably will occur which means that a system to deal with them must be implemented in an effective way.
While in other pilots the distance and language became a barrier for the municipalities’ teams to contact OneSource, therefore making the pilot leader an intermediary of communications and issue reporting, with Lisbon this was many times unclear and difficult to implement, resulting in misunderstandings and struggle in communication. This was particularly true once the political negotiations were completed and the platform was launched. For Lisbon Municipality, it was much easier to speak directly to OneSource than to In Loco in case of technical issues. For any methodological advice, In Loco was the one contacted by Lisbon Municipality. As a consequence, most times it was OneSource that informed In Loco of issues or special technical requests raised by the municipality. This cannot be understood as negative, it just became a different approach of what was foreseen in the project design.
On a final note, it must be said that In Loco has been developing work in the field of PB mainly through consultancy to municipalities but it is not a technological developer nor it has knowledge in the field, so there are tasks such as platform installation that were not tested from In Loco’s side. [14]
The most innovative aspects of Lisboa Participa were the integration of all the available participation tools providing them a common identity, uniformity and clarification of their purpose all in the same space. This process has enabled the implementation of the Single Sign On - even though only partially - which represents something that was never tried before by the municipality. It also expanded participation, creating new forms of involvement of citizens that previously did not exist (LisBOAideia and thematic consultations).
EMPATIA has created channels of communication within the participation tools for users and the management team. For example, a user that submits an idea through LisBOAidea can easily communicate with the management team by sending a message through the platform and vice-versa. LisBOAideia also took advantage of certain trendy features used in social media, by offering citizens an easy way to express if they agree or not with a certain idea, with the likes and dislikes type of voting. [15]
Lisbon, the only pilot that implemented a participatory system and a cross-selling strategy, shows the power of such strategy. Even if the city did not invest resources in advertising for the new continuous ideation platform a significant number of citizens participated in LisBOAideia. When these citizens were asked what motivated them to participate, 41% replied that while they were looking to participate in another process they stumbled upon LisBOAideia on the integrated participatory platform. [16]
See Also
Participatory Budgeting in Milan, Cycle 2017/2018
Participatory Budgeting in Říčany, Czech Republic
Participatory Budgeting in Wuppertal, Germany
References
[1] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 68-69.
[2] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 72-73.
[3] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 68.
[4] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 79.
[5] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 76.
[6] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D4.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_4.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 28.
[7] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Evaluation and Pilots Impact Assessment (final). Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/D3.2-Evaluation-and-Pilots-Impact-Assessment-final.pdf, pp. 104.
[8] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Evaluation and Pilots Impact Assessment (final). Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/D3.2-Evaluation-and-Pilots-Impact-Assessment-final.pdf, p. 73-75.
[9] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Evaluation and Pilots Impact Assessment (final). Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/D3.2-Evaluation-and-Pilots-Impact-Assessment-final.pdf, p. 79.
[10] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 108-109.
[11] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 97-98.
[12] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 113.
[13] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D4.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_4.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 119.
[14] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, p. 109.
[15] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D3.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_3.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 113.
[16] EMPATIA project (2018). Deliverable: D4.2 Pilots implementation - final. Retrieved from https://empatia-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EMPATIA_Deliverable_4.2_13FINAL.pdf, pp. 97.
External Links
www.op.lisboaparticipa.pt/home
Notes
Lead image: Main banner of Lisboa Participa. Câmara Municipal de Lisboa: https://lisboaparticipa.pt/content/eykst32TkqAyS9aWnkXuSFxLrhXZ1r0v