In this article we explain the ‘proposals/petitions’ participation method. You’ll learn how to customize and activate this unique participation method, how to set the participation threshold and organize feedback on the proposals.

Notes on proposals:

Within the landscape of participatory democracy, Proposals and Petitions are powerful conduits for bottom-up participation, and the backbone of a healthy participatory democracy.

This type of participation differs from the current idea-gathering approach of the platform because it doesn’t fit into the limitations of an existing project. Rather than responses to a fixed question asked by governments (ie “what colour should the bins be?“), these are items initiated by citizens themselves (ie “we want to change garbage collecting routes“). You could for instance compare it with an open "idea box".

Resident proposals/petitions allow citizens to write down their proposals at any time, and gather support for their proposal. Proposals that reach a pre-defined threshold are promised to receive 'a response' from you. A proposal may be a simple request to the city, but it might also require the city to play a supporting role in the spirit of co-creation.

Resident proposals/petitions allow you to keep track of what your citizens deem important, right on your very own participation platform. You’ll always have a good sense of what’s missing on your policy agenda. And you offer your citizens a place to give input on topics that aren’t covered yet by one of your existing projects on the platform.

Our Proposal/petition participation method gives you full flexibility and control to set up and manage this powerful participation method.

To enable proposals/petitions you need to create a new project, make sure to name it “Proposals” or “Petitions”, then select the “Proposals, petitions or initiatives” participation method in the phase “Set up”:

In the Project settings (top right) you will be able to customise the description and information you want to share to your residents about this participation method. You can add images, attach documents and describe the goals, processes and rules so residents have all the information needed to submit the most relevant ideas.

Using the content building in the “description” tab you will be able to completely customise the look and feel of this project page.

more information on how to use the content builder here

It is a fundamental part of this participation method to make it very clear in the project description to residents what is the eligibility criteria, to make sure that relevant ideas are submitted.

A commonly used set of such criteria: “The proposal should…

It’s crucial to define in advance what happens when a proposal gathers the required number of votes within the number of days, and communicate it to residents in the project description

The most common option is to invite the proposal author(s) to the next council meeting to present the proposal, and where the council will give an official reaction on it.

But it is totally up to you to offer something that suits your context most and that fits your needs and available resources.

Some alternative options:

To communicate more clearly in which stage the idea is in, as well as to manage the ideas internally, you can set different statuses to ideas. All statuses can be found in the “input manager” tab of your project phase and under each idea you can select which status this idea should receive.

By default 5 statuses will appear and are described below. To manage/edit these and create new statuses to fit the needs of your local government structure, head to the platform “settings”, under “input statuses”

3 out of 5 default proposal statuses are automatic ones, and can’t deleted from the status list. These will autmoatically change depedning on the rules below and can't be manually selected.

Pre-screening: This status will appear when you turn on the toggle "Require Admin review of input" in the phase settings (if you do not see this toggle this mean it is not in your price plan). This is the status when an idea has been submitted but still needs to be approved internally before it can published on the platform. When this status is active the idea does not show up on the platform.

The other 2 statuses are manual ones. You can decide when to give which idea one of these statuses by just selecting the corresponding box on the individual idea.

Note: even if an idea is expired or didn't reach the threshold yet, you can always decide to already/still move forward with it (e.g. because it matches your existing policy plans).

Selecting one of these manual statuses will require you to give a written update to that idea, visible to all.

All new statuses created by you are also manual statuses.

You can create new statuses by navigating to the platform “settings” > click on "Input statuses” tab > pressing the button “add status”. There you can define the name of the new status, the colour and what its function represents.

The number of votes required for a citizen proposal to be considered. As a rule of thumb, this is often expressed in % of your total population (ie 1-3% of the population).

The amount of days one has to gather that support. It’s important to find a balance between allowing enough time to rally support versus motivating people to actively work on their proposals. 3 months, or 90 days, is in many cases ideal.

If you allow users to participate anonymously, their identity will be hidden from other users, project moderators and admins. These contributions can still be moderated.

If you switch on 'Require Admin review of input', the status "pre-screening" will appear and every new submitted idea will be given this status automatically. Ideas won't be visible until an admin reviews and approves them. Note that it is not possible anymore to edit an idea once it has been reviewed and approved.

(if you do not see this option, this means it is not part of your price plan)

If you want to strengthen legitimacy and visibility for proposal you can enable cosponsorship, by adding this field onto your proposals/petitions form in the form builder. (If you don't see this field or question type on your form builder is that it's not accessible to your price plan)
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Proposals or petitions won't be visible until the number of cosponsors required set by you has been reached. When you enable this feature, you can fill in how many cosponsors a participants needs for his/her proposal to be able to be eligible.

When someone is creating a proposals there will be a field where cosponsors can be invited to be cosponsor. The cosponsors need an account on the platform to be invited and they will receive an email with the invite to cosponsor a proposal.

The input form is customized in the same way as the ideation method.

More information on how to customize the input form here

The only difference in this method is that if the option of Cosponsorship is selected, as described above, an additional section at the bottom of the input form will appear to add the names of the cosponsors:

Similarly, if the option of User anonymity is selected an extra section will appear at the bottom of the input form:

To make sure this page is easily found by residents you can pin it to your Navigation Bar.

Go to “Pages & menu” > click on “add project to the navbar” > in the pop up you can select the proposal/petition project.

Remember: you can only add a maximum of 5 pages in the navigation bar (in addition to the Home and projects pages)!

You can also highlight this project on the homepage to make sure it is even more visible to residents.

Go to “Pages & menu” > click “edit” next to the “Home” page > in the homepage builder drag and drop the “Highlight” option anywhere in your homepage.

You can configure the titles/description/buttons to your liking in the pop-up window on the right

Once your Proposal/Petition project is published you can moderate and manage the ideas in the “input manager” tab.

Every new idead can be assigned to yourself or one of the other admins on the platform. By doing so, that person becomes responsible for the follow-up and will be notified when her/his action is required.

You can choose who the “default assignee” by going to the project settings > clicking on “access rights” > under “who is responsible for processing posts” you can choose the staff member to be assigned by default.

You can always decided to assign certain ideas to other platform admins and project managers by selecting their name in the “Assignee” drop down in the input manager.

As mentioned above some statuses are activated automatically while others need to be selected manually. As a general rule, every time an idea changes status the residents that are following that idea will receive an email that the status has changed.

The change in status and the status description will be seen at the top of the about box

If you are working with other admins on moderating proposals it can be useful to be able to leave comments on specific proposals that only other admins can see. To facilitate this internal collaboration you can use the 'Internal conversation' feature.

If you press on an idea in the input manager, a pop up will appear where you can see more information about the idea, add official updates and at the bottom you can switch between 'Internal conversation' and 'Public discussion'.

(if this option does not show up this means that it is not part of your price plan)