Paris’ public housing agency Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris (RIVP) is reusing Consul, the eParticipation portal built by the city of Madrid, available as open source software. RIVP, a city-owned agency, is using the software to gather input on 10 of its social housing projects across the city.
RIVP hopes that using the Consul portal will enable it to get ideas on how to improve living conditions, increase solidarity, and strengthen ties between neighbours. Inhabitants are invited to submit plans, comment on proposals, study projects in detail, and vote on them.
Consul was published by the city of Madrid in 2015. The software lets citizens and stakeholders propose ideas, and offers voting, participatory budgets, collaborative legislation, public debates and collective interviews. According to the developers, the software can handle complex urban redevelopment projects.
So far, over 30 municipalities and organisations across Spain are using the software to engage citizens or specific stakeholder groups. The software is also used by the cities of Buenos Aires and Mendoza in Argentina, and Nariño in Columbia.
Consul is published using the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3). The software is built using Ruby on Rails, Jquery and Coffeescript. It uses the Postgresql database management system.
More information:
Cadenaser news item (in Spanish)
Somoslibres news item (in Spanish)
RIVP participatory budget portal (in French)
Consul on Github
Consul at Decide.es (in Spanish)