“WeGovNow! - Towards We-Government: Collective and participative approaches for addressing local policy challenges” is an OpenStreetMap based E-Government solution to be validated and evaluated in London Southwark (UK), Turin (Italy) and San Donà di Piave (Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy) [1]. WeGovNow will seamlessly integrate applications such as Community Maps, GeoKey, FirstLife, ImproveMyCity, LiquidFeedback and OntoMap. The project will add new modules such as a TrustedMarketplace and be open for existing citizen services and third party applications in general. Mobile use will be possible with WeGovNow apps as well as third party apps. Municipalities can allow login by Facebook Login, Google SignIn and Microsoft Account. For certain actions in WeGovNow municipalities may also require a verification by a national or local identity provider. Voting privileges can be gained by verification of an existing account.
Axel Kistner, Co-Founder of LiquidFeedback, explains: “LiquidFeedback has morphed into an international benchmark for democratic participation using the internet. Project LiquidFeedback Berlin (Germany) will be responsible for opinion formation as well as the integration framework and will closely cooperate with Empirica Bonn (Germany), Funka Nu AB (Sweden), Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini (Italy), Infalia (Greece), Mapping for Change (UK), Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy), University College London (UK) and Universität Heidelberg (Germany).”
The project builds upon earlier research and development work concerning both citizen-driven systems for local public service improvement and digital neighborhood platforms. It will progress the current state of the art by further developing existing solutions and integrating them within a single community engagement platform, that will allow people to report problems and suggest improvements, to discuss their relevance, explore ways to fix problems through collective action, find solutions to compensate for resource shortages affecting the quality of publicity provided services, debate topics of strategic nature, and develop and vote upon concrete suggestions for local policy action.
[1] WeGovNow.eu
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693514.
