Citizen Panel has invited 406,250 citizens to 15+ juries
Representative selections for citizen forums using privacy by design
Transparency and participation are themes that have become indispensable in politics. The government is increasingly using citizen participation to create support for its plans. They do this by organizing citizen consultations. This is an event where citizens come together to discuss government plans. All voices in society should be represented; rich and poor, young and old, rural and urban. This information is of course not readily available, so our challenge was to collect it in a privacy-friendly manner. Together with EMMA, a research, consultancy and participation agency, we have developed a tool with which a representative group can be composed.
The selection tool for the Water Authorities Brabantse Delta has been developed to help with the random selection of candidates from an approached group, while ensuring that each group is sufficiently represented. It is a means of organizing a citizens' consultation with a very good reflection of society, in order to collect input from the citizens concerned. This project has been set up in accordance with all (technical) requirements of the GDPR, including hosting within the EU. By using existing frameworks or standard components, we guarantee good security of personal data.
A lots drawing mechanism has been built for selecting candidates. The draw is a puzzle in which a group must be drawn that meets the minimum criteria. For example, we want to ensure that sufficient people from every age category are represented for a citizens' deliberation. Running a draw can be done at the touch of a button and only takes seconds! If you want to do this manually, it is not privacy friendly in the first place, but it is also a very time-consuming puzzle due to the selection criteria, sometimes even more than a day.
The selection tool has been developed incrementally, with the most important functionalities developed first. This way we ensured that we can launch as quickly as possible with the most valuable features, but at the same time it gives us the flexibility to make adjustments when necessary. The project was carried out by a compact team, which allowed us to keep communication lines short and efficient.
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