Good Practice Examples
Here you can find practical suggestions on how online participation portals can be improved, illustrated by good practice examples from many different countries.
What are Online Participation Portals?
Online participation portals are becoming increasingly popular, especially in comparison to other analogue and digital participation formats (Billert & Peters 2021: 365). All activities are bundled in one place in the portals and citizens can get involved with the help of various information and communication technologies. The portals are usually designed for long-term use (Maetzel 2023: 5; Viale Pereira et al. 2017, cited in Billert & Peters 2021: 365). The advantage of digital participation portals is that citizens can find relevant documents and information more quickly and the overall visibility of participation processes is improved. In addition, online participation portals can introduce common standards in administrative and technical support and increase transparency, as participation processes can also be tracked retrospectively. The portals allow planning processes to be carried out, stored and organised transparently over several years so that citizens can also enter the process at a later date (Lots* n.d.: 11; Kuder 2020: 4).
In addition, online participation platforms make it possible to address different target groups through accessible design such as multilingualism of the website, use of simple language, customisable text size and much more (Hilkenmeyer et al. 2021). It can also be assumed that more people will participate and the quality of the comments and statements will increase if the portals are designed to be user-friendly and the process and project results are communicated transparently on the portal (Leitner & Sachs 2017: 46; citizenlab 2021: 16). The portals also make it easier for the authorities to unite and process the data.
In addition to paid online participation portals that are implemented by external service providers, there are also portals that are hosted by the authorities themselves and are based on free open source software (Pietsch 2023: 56; Pakleppa et al. 2023: 8). Actors for social welfare such as municipalities and civil society organisations are therefore recommended to use free open source tools (Maetzel 2023: 5). These also enable the free use and further development of the source code (Maetzel 2021). In addition, open source software allows more freedom and control in terms of data protection (Maetzel 2023: 5).
