CitizenLab - Citizen participation platform

Digital participation platforms are important tools for increasing citizen engagement and improving government responsiveness. However, analysing the high volumes of citizen input collected on these platforms is extremely time-consuming and daunting for city officials; this technical difficulty can keep them from uncovering valuable learnings. Setting up a digital participation platform therefore isn’t enough: it’s also necessary to make data analysis more accessible so that civil servants can tap into collective intelligence and make better informed decisions. The challenge of automation that has been faced with, by the civic tech company developing this solution, is shared by the public sector at large. CitizenLab aims to bridge the knowledge gap that currently exists in the public sector.The platform administrators have access to all of this information at a glance in intelligent, real- time dashboards. The topic modelling makes it easy to see what the citizen’s priorities are, and to make decisions accordingly. The CitizenLab Platform is in use in many local authorities which are likely to use some of the elements of the AI to analyse volumes of citizen input. The main challenge in citizen participation projects isn’t to collect citizens’ input: it’s to analyse it. Overworked and under-resourced administrations often lack the time and technical skills to process the contributions; as a result, valuable insights get lost in the process. By helping administrations effortlessly process citizen input and extract the key ideas, the NLP technology has been integrated to the CitizenLab platform, therefore giving civil servants a centralised place to gather, moderate and analyse citizens’ ideas. (Additional source: https://www.citizenlab.co/case-studies).