The Madrid Participa project is a highly efficient instrument used to increase citizen participation in the decision-making process in the city of Madrid, offering a more dynamic and continuous dialogue between political representatives and citizens. When compared to traditional citizen consultations, the Madrid Participa approach of using secure eVoting technology in parallel with the paper channel enables Madrid City Council to carry out more convenient and user-friendly consultations while avoiding the costs of a traditional vote. To date, the eConsultations platform implemented has been used regularly in 22 citizen consultations involving more than 3.5 million citizens.
Policy Context
The City Council of Madrid is working in the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) for more effective public participation in policy making, involving citizens in sustainable development projects and activities, according with the Manchester eGovernment Ministerial Declaration (2005), the priorities of the Commission’s eGovernment Action Plan (2006), and Aalborg Chart (1994). Regarding Spanish policies on this subject, Madrid City Council has been one of the pioneering municipalities of Spain in understanding and applying article 70B, section 3 of Law 57/2003 of 16 December regulating the Local Regime Bases, in which municipalities are urged to promote the use of information and communication technologies with residents for the carrying out of citizen consultations, making government more transparent and responsive to citizens. Internally, Madrid Participa, and its usage of ICTs for engaging the citizens in the decision making process, is in line with the different council regulations that define telematic transactions and e-government initiatives to improve the communication between the Council and the citizens/business. Precisely the project Madrid Participa has influenced the way the decisions are made in the Council units using the tool, as now they can consider citizens’ opinion regarding key issues as another factor in the decision making process. Madrid Participa is an e-democracy project that aims at the following: - Foster citizen engagement in local governance - Strengthen local citizen associations - Help bridge the digital divide in society - Increase awareness of the numerous public access Internet centres deployed throughout the city since 2004 - Provide citizens with electronic means to participate in the local decision-making processes that directly affect them Although these objectives were previous to Council of Europe recommendations on eDemocracy “Council of Europe 2004â€, they are very similar to the ones described in such recommendations.
Description of target users and groups
The target group of Madrid Participa is all the citizens registered in Madrid over the age of 16. Given the fact that typically the e-consultations are about relevant district issues, even though the legal voting age in Spain is 18, the City Council found it interesting to include younger citizens as well as immigrants in the consultation initiatives.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
The main manger of Madrid Participa project is the Directorate of Citizen Participation (DCP) of the City Council of Madrid, with the technical support of the Directorate of Innovation and Technology (DIT). The DCP has been in charge of promoting internally the usage of e-participation tools among the rest of units in the Council (district boards and other directorates), managing the neighbourhood associations and taking care of the sociological aspects, while the DIT has been responsible of assessing and selecting the required e-consultations tool, interact with the technological partners, and taking care of all the technological issues. Also, in each e-consultation there are one or more ‘political sponsors’, that is, the District boards or Council directorates that detect the need to carry out an e-consultation. The first e-consultation in the Centre District required the involvement and support of different private companies (Oracle, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Accenture and Scytl), some NGOs (as the Cyber-volunteers), and some academia (University of Leon). In the following e-consultations, Scytl has been the company providing the secure e-voting technology used in the Internet channels, and the University of Leon and the Autonomous University of Madrid have been in charge of the sociological studies. Multi-channel issues: The City Council of Madrid has used different voting channels during the execution of the e-consultation processes. The first e-consultation process, Centre District, implemented different electronic channels to test which were more popular with citizens: remote electronic participation from a personal computer with an Internet connection; remote electronic participation from mobile telephones (SMS and Java-enabled phones), and onsite electronic participation from computers provided in six polling stations set up especially for the occasion. In the second e-consultation process, Huerta de la Salud, only the poll-site based participation was implemented, using electronic and paper based channels: onsite electronic participation, from computers provided in three polling stations (two neighbourhood associations offices and a municipal’s public Internet access centre), and paper ballots from the same polling-stations. After analyzing the results of this second citizen consultation it was made clear that using both electronic and paper based channels drastically increased participation when compared with Centre District, as there were some citizens reticent to the use of new technologies. Therefore the next e-consultation processes, (all the related to Agenda 21), used the same channels in the following way: remote electronic participation from personal computers with an Internet connection; onsite electronic participation from computers provided in municipal’s permanent public Internet centres with the help of voluntary personnel, and polling stations with paper ballots The last successful results have confirmed that the multi-channel approach (remote Internet, Internet Public Centres and paper ballots) is the best one regarding citizen reach and cost (as several public centres are reused).
Main results, benefits and impacts
The absolute participation rate was 0,65% in the Centre District; 2,55% in the Hortaleza event and ranging from 0,14% to 1,07%, depending on the district, in the recently executed Agenda 21 consultations. Despite these might seem low participation turnouts, the council is more interested in obtaining a good feedback from the citizens interested in the issues than in getting a high participation rate. In fact these figures are higher when compared to the participation rates of ‘conventional’ processes not using the Internet channel. Therefore, the higher participation rate due to the e-voting channel is perceived by the council as new opinions that would not have been cast using the paper channel. Those surveyed in the first process valued very positively the need of this kind of citizen consultations, although they were especially critic with the questions put forward and the response options provided. On the other hand, the second consultation was valued very positively, both regarding the need of this kind of event and the question formulated. Innovation: The Council of Madrid required an electronic consultation tool that provided high levels of security and trust. Another requirement for the tool was that it had to support different voting channels, including paper ballots. Finally, the tool had to be user-friendly, in order to make the voting process very easy and simple for both citizens and administrations. The City council selected Scytl’s Pnyx.government, a complete e-voting/e-consultation multi-channel solution with state-of-the-art security measures that guarantee: - The total integrity of the opinions/votes cast, protecting the votes against internal an external attackers. - The correct authentication of the citizens - The absolute privacy of the voters - The secrecy of the partial results - The individual verification by each voter that his/her vote has been properly counted by means of a vote receipt. This approach is very innovative, as the Council is regularly using the secure e-consultations platform to improve its transparency and allow its citizens to participate in the city’s governance.
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not availableTrack record of sharing
Madrid Participa is the first initiative of this kind in Spain that has implemented a secure e-voting platform to regularly perform binding e-consultations among its citizens. Therefore, it is a clear point of reference for other European City Councils who are interested in carrying out ‘serious’ citizen consultations. Since 2004 the City Council of Madrid has gained valuable experience by running more than 20 e-consultations in various city districts. To share its experience, Madrid City Council has been actively promoting their e-consultation initiatives and experience internationally over the last few years, as well as sharing the technology with other City Council departments. In this sense, representatives of the City Council have participated in more than 30 national and international events related to the citizen participation, e-Democracy, e-Voting and e-Government, including a Telecities meeting in Vienna, the International e-Democracy Forum in Paris, two e-Governance conferences in Canada and Chile or the Internet Global Congress in Barcelona. Also, the City Council has always been open to share its experience with other interested governments, having met with several cities representatives, especially from Spain, but even from Australia (Government of the State of Victoria). In the same way, Scytl, the supplier of the advance security technology for Madrid Participa, has been also disseminating the experience in international forums and among its partners and customers at worldwide level, using it as a total success case. This promotional activity has made that several other councils start to execute ‘serious’ e-consultations in a regular basis, such as Amposta, Úbeda and Baeza (Spain), following the Madrid Participa model.
Lessons learnt
Lesson 1 - A platform which is used for (multiple) e-consultations must use state-of-the-art security to guarantee the critical and specific security requirements. These specific security measures are necessary to generate trust among the citizens. Lesson 2 - It is necessary to provide voters with multiple voting channels to guarantee their participation. Participation from polling stations with computers and paper ballots, and remotely through the Internet is a must. Other channels such as Java mobile phones or SMS are complementary, and their use depends on the available budget and on security and usability issues. Citizen registration and voting processes must be simple in order to increase participation rates. Lesson 3 - Greater efforts should be made to broadcast the initiative using all media channels and neighbour’s associations. This is critical to achieve a high awareness of the project among the citizens, so they know that they can give their opinion on different issues. The involvement of local neighbour associations is important, as the council can reach more people with almost not extra cost. It is also very important that the council asks the citizens questions that affect their every day life.
Scope: Local (city or municipality)