One of the important aspect which discussed frequently in UN conferences on Smart City, Urban Resilience and other SDG goals achieving is public participation aka citizen engagement. Whether it is top down approach or bottom up approach of involving public participation on decision making helps the government to get more ideas, avoid protest and also make every decision inclusive. 

People trust

In recent years loss of public trust in authorities and politicians has become a widespread concern in many democratic societies. Public participation is a regarded as one potential solution to the crisis in public trust and governance, particularly in the UK, Europe, and other democracies. The idea is that public should be involved more fully in the policy process in that authorities seek public views and participation, instead of treating the public as simply passive recipients of policy decisions.

wikipedia

The underlying assumption by political theorists, social commentators, and even politicians is that public participation increase public trust in authorities, improving citizen political efficacy, enhancing democratic ideals and even improving the quality of policy decisions. However, the assumed benefits of public participation in restoring public trust are yet to be confirmed

But engaging public participation in the process is not easy because not every citizen are interested or have proper workflow to contribute. Let’s take a look at the recent research conducted by Governing Institute to learn the expectation of the people

“Many people never contact their local governments to ask for services or information. And few government agencies have deployed technology to help engage citizens.”

On 2017, the Governing institute surveyed 2,006 citizen and 125 local governments. This is what they found

This questions asked in two different perspectives.

  1. What government officials think citizens want in these platform?
  2. What Citizens actually want and how best to use technology to get more citizens?

Understanding who this questions are asked is important. The pain point we going to solve is for the same people.

When the citizens are asked about the current infrastructure the government provides, only 36% are satisfied with that service. Citizens feel their services request are not answered promptly.

Then they were asked about what is the response time between the time you submit an inquiry/complaint and the time local government official reply back. This response time is critical factor because

  • The trust between two parties increases only if they see their voices are heard
  • If the citizens feel it is the waste of time to submit/ask anything from the local officials, they will not speak again about this. Then the local officials will be lost on what else they should be doing to their public.

okay so the survey also overall how much % of people are really submitting this request?

So what is stopping other citizens doesn’t which department to contact and also the channels the citizens need to contact the officials are not user friendly.

There are currently few government tech focused platforms available to overcome this challenges but government officials need to move forward with future thinking and understanding what the user wants. They do not want simple forms or call center line because they have been used to social media and online commerce sites where the customer experience is swift and easy to do. So they demand a similar nature.

What does Citizens and What our app has?

Overall conclusion

  • Government need to increase the overall public participation in decision making and other ideas. So they can involve go towards more inclusive advancement
  • To achieve this, the government should also design the citizen engagement platforms in a way it is easy for public too participate, accessible anywhere , also government can use the data in structured way and can visualise in simple way.

iStrata Digital have the technology solution for Government

  • With iStrata, our technology solutions are already pre-built and ready to be deployed anytime in a matter of days. Thus avoiding cost issues or expectations.
  • Our solutions have been built with rigorous experience by doing ground works by visiting different local offices, public transportation and observing the citizen behaviour.
  • And also taking inspiration from different technology patterns of Millennial and Z-generation on what they would like to have in the smart apps.
  • Overall from security and data privacy perspective, we have the experts who can customise the solutions to sit on government data center/premises.
  • Contact us to know more about [email protected]. We are ready to deploy the solution for a pilot period.