Better Revkjavik 📍Reykjavik, Iceland

Author: Zarrin Fatima, Nayla Saniour & Maija Federly

Redesigned by: Carla Álvarez Gonzalez

How can digital crowdsourcing transform urban solutions and empower citizens to shape their city's future?

Better Reykjavik is an online platform for the crowdsourcing of solutions to urban challenges launched in May 2010. It is a co-creation project of the Citizens Foundation, Reykjavik City and its citizens that connects them and improves trust and policy. It’s a platform for crowdsourcing solutions to urban challenges and has multiple democratic functions: Agenda setting, Participatory budgeting and Policymaking. Innovations include unique debating system, crowd-sourcing, submission of multimedia content and extensive use of AI to improve the user experience as well as content submitted. Furthermore, it is an umbrella for several programs, including the city’s participatory budgeting platform called “My Neighborhood” and the City Council’s participatory lawmaking project is called “Your Voice.” Over 20% of the population of the City regularly uses the platform, which has over 27,000 registered users, primarily for participatory budgeting.

The Better Reykjavik platform was built using the Your Priorities web application developed by the non-profit, Iceland-based Citizens Foundation. Using Your Priorities, individuals, groups, and governments can create their own participatory web portals with various sub-forums called 'communities'. Your Priorities was developed as a way to make online citizen participation simpler and more convenient. Unique to the platform is the ability to both propose ideas and deliberate on other proposals. According to developers, the application “allows large groups to speak with one voice and organize ideas.” (Citizens Foundation). By separating points for and against into columns, people are able to see the most popular points of view on the topic.

By bringing citizens into the political realm and giving them a real voice in policy decisions, the platform has not only empowered citizens, but increased transparency and helped to align government action with citizen opinion and priorities.

One of its core principles is crowd-sourcing, which is a process of “collaborative knowledge production” based on the collection of input from the public as opposed to from the experts. It has empowered ordinary citizens to engage in deliberations on important public policies and at the same time greatly reduced the influence of elite interests in politics.

One of its core principles is crowd-sourcing, which is a process of “collaborative knowledge production” based on the collection of input from the public as opposed to from the experts. It has empowered ordinary citizens to engage in deliberations on important public policies and at the same time greatly reduced the influence of elite interests in politics.

Better Reykjavik could be the best direct source of ensuring climate solutions receive feedback and that that city is moving well towards the 2030 goal.