Prototyping open government at the Basque Country.
A project with Basque Country Government
THE PROJECT
The Basque Country Government has been one of the first supporters of the Open Government initiatives. They started early creating Irekia, their OGov platform. And now they wanted to innovate again with the second version of it.
We worked together conceptualizing the platform, building interfaces that will motivate citizens to engage further with the government and which will invite government to be more transparent and communicative through conversation and debate.
What we made:
- Conceptualization
- Visual and interaction design
- Front-end development prototype
- Mobile apps
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MOBILE DATA LOGGER
We developed a mobile application to facilitate Irekia usage by politicians. Despite their busy agendas and his mobility, the datalogger allows them to easily update their status, upload images or videos from public events or answer citizen questions and proposals wherever they are.
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THE CHALLENGE
The main challenges of the project were:
- To build an easy to use platform so that every Basque Country citizen could use it easily and frequently.
- To encourage political participation, so they would participate registering their daily job, proposing new initiatives and answer citizen questions in a quick way without adding extra work to their agendas.
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THE SOLUTION
We shaped the solution as a social network, a model well known by the majority of internet users. It allows the basque citizens to interact, make questions, send opinions and vote the different political initiatives started by their elected representatives. The "follow" mechanism, the wall-like model and the notifications system allow them to easily supervise politician activity.
On the politician side we built a HTML5 mobile application, so they could update their status, answer questions or provide transparency about their daily work from everywhere.
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THE RESULTS
Irekia 1 was a great success in terms of innovation. Now we needed to define and design something that will make Irekia 2 stay on top of the global initiatives on Open Government.
By defining new ways for citizens to understand and interact with their government we hope the new Irekia will make the Basque Country one of the most Open in the world. And we are very proud to be part of it.
And, as usually, it is open source, You can fork the project and enjoy it
HIGHLIGHTS
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Activity streams
The platform is structured around chronological streams that show the full activity of each area, politician or user, providing the higher level of transparency and encouraging interaction.
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Participation and accountability
The new Irekia specially focus on politician accountability, highlighting the number of unanswered questions, the time it takes each question to be answered, politician participation statistics, etc.
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Direct consults and polls
Proposals were introduced to increase the citizen participation in decision taking, so politician could know from first hand the opinion of the citizenship about their initiatives.