Why use digital participation platforms?

Digital participation platforms offer a variety of benefits. When used well, digital platforms expand the reach and inclusiveness of civic engagement, allowing more people—including those who may not attend town halls or public hearings—to have their say. They can make participatory processes more transparent, provide accessible records of inputs, and support more continuous engagement over time.

For example, everyone with internet access can track a public project's status as it's developed and launched (or stalled!). Likewise, participation platforms often serve as communication hubs for participating communities to meet, communicate, and organize.

Developers of digital participation platforms promise other benefits, such as:

• Reaching more people than via in-person meetings, because residents can take part when they're not busy and without traveling.

• Lower costs compared to traditional outreach methods.

• Integration with other participatory democracy processes, such as by collecting ideas for in-person deliberation.

• Automated analysis of large amounts of resident feedback.

• Easier follow-up communications with residents based on their interests and ideas.

• More open and transparent decision-making. 

Besides digitizing traditional engagement tactics, online platforms offer new modes of participation. For example, consider the group decision-making tool Pol.is. It invites people to draft value statements that others can vote on and rally around. An example is, "Rideshare drivers should make a living wage." The platform then uses algorithms to map existing (but unrecognized) areas of consensus between otherwise opposing stakeholders.

When used effectively, digital platforms can amplify the benefits of public participation, resulting in better-informed decisions and more trust in public institutions. Digital platforms also can make it easier and cheaper for officials to open up decision-making more often. A wider range of people can thus share their perspectives, better informing decisions before governments finalize plans. People hopefully trust government more when they have had the opportunity to take part early on in a process. And increased public attention to decision-making and implementation can contribute to more responsive governments.

What is a digital participation platform?

The modern digital participation platform emerged in the mid-2000s. E-democracy and civic tech practitioners introduced websites and apps to help engage participants beyond just broadcasting information one-way. The goal was to evolve beyond traditional in-person meetings, surveys, and other methods of collecting resident feedback. This allowed public institutions to invite people to submit their votes and comments via their computers and smartphones. Digital platforms allow residents to participate in collective activities like:

• Proposing new projects.

• Deliberating to reach agreement on shared decisions.

• Planning how to use public spaces.

• Voting on how to spend public budgets.

• Prioritizing potential options.

• Drafting policies and legislation.

Although digital platforms were originally conceived of as ways to supplant analog participatory processes, it's become clear in recent years that the best approach is often a hybrid one that brings together the strengths of online and offline experiences to best serve communities. This guide discusses how digital platforms can support in-person engagement.

Why open up participation?

Engaging constituents through digital channels can require significant work before, during, and afterwards to encourage people's active involvement. And any strategy to involve more people in decision making often consumes significant time and energy, not to mention budgets.

So why do it? Global reports find that a majority of people around the world, and especially those living in democratic nations, feel like "they have no voice in politics and that their governments are not acting in their interest." The UNDP's 2024 Human Development Report likewise found that half of people worldwide report having no or limited control over their lives, with over two-thirds feeling that they have little influence in the decisions of their government.

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Add graph from https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1J0PyynOcxQ3z7_KCPVZp4BJCPhuiM7Tk

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Graph produced by Dalia Research for the Global Perceptions of Democracy report.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals include targets and indicators related to participation. SDG target 16.7 calls for "ensuring responsive, inclusive,

participatory and representative decision-making at all levels". Nation states and other institutions looking to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals must work to introduce participatory decision-making, and participation platforms are one of the best ways to achieve this goal at national scale.

Research suggests that governments and institutions that introduce more open and inclusive decision-making see an abundance of interrelated benefits. Residents and participants are more likely to:

• Gain civic skills they can use in other arenas, including leadership capacity.,

• Have higher confidence in and satisfaction with local governance.

• Report access to higher-quality public infrastructure.

• Have a better understanding of their own rights and duties.

• Enjoy stronger ties to their communities.

In addition, governments and institutions are more likely to:

• Directly address the needs of under-served or hard-to-reach communities.,,

• Include people's opinions in their problem-solving, and in doing so create more effective public services.,

• Experience less corruption, thus allowing limited public resources to be stretched further.

• Enjoy better dialogue between participants and government leaders.

Researchers have observed these benefits around the world, from rural Russia, to large American cities, to entire countries like Brazil. Open participation takes different shapes in different contexts. In Brazil, for example, participatory budgeting programs were launched in places as varied as its wealthy South and impoverished Northeast. This wide variety of contexts suggests that open participation is flexible enough to meet local needs in diverse places.

On a global level, the United Nations E-Participation Index found a strong correlation between governments' improvement of digital services with their adoption of digital participation platforms. The greater a national government's level of digital development, the greater their score on the E-Participation Index. Governments offering better digital services are more likely to adopt digital participation platforms, and vice versa. Outliers exist, however, and this finding does not imply causation in either direction.