Aarhus
Participation project name: Sammen Om Aarhus (Together for Aarhus)
Last updated
Participation project name: Sammen Om Aarhus (Together for Aarhus)
Last updated
Aarhus is using the Consul Democracy platform for their participatory budgeting (PB) exercises. When the city implemented the platform in 2018, it was already experimenting with PB, but lacked a methodology or tool to do it.
The main reason to start using it, according to Frederik Pedersen of Aarhus municipality, was to 'streamline' the PB process and to make it digital.
Aarhus has tried many different features of the platform, but PB was the logical thing to do in terms of getting funding for implementation and development.
Each year 1,3 million euros are spent through the PB feature on the Consul Democracy platform. This substantial budget can, according to a city council decision, only be spent on directly funding citizen projects.
This is a good thing. However, Frederik and his team learned that it is important to have enough resources, not only for the PB budget, but also for running the processes and supporting the local communities.
Despite these pitfalls, Aarhus has made the platform its own and added a few useful functionalities, through its collaboration with the Danish software company Bellcom.
The first is a multi-project PB view where it is possible to list several PB project on the PB landing page and, thus, run different PB processes (Deltagerbudgetter in Danish, currently, november 2024, 4 are active) at the same time within a single platform.
A good practice when executing the different PB processes is that Aarhus municipality understand a PB 'process' as a 'PB community', referring to the close collaboration with local community councils and associations in the process.
Another neat feature is 'single sign-on' which means that, as Danish citizen, it is not necessary to create an account to log in to the Sammen Om Aarhus platform. Instead, this is done with national ID authentication, called MitID. For this, the open authentication standard SAML was used.
Aarhus city actually uses different platform alongside Consul, which is not the ideal situation, according to Pedersen.
The city uses its own proprietary platform to organize and invite citizen proposals, for instance. On top of that, there is another platform in use for receiving comments and complaints about certain city policies such as the closing down of a road.
The latter platform existed before the Consul platform was adopted, but developing PB as a feature of it turned out to be too expensive, which is why the city started looking for an free and open source alternative.
