Algorithms For Democracy.
This project at SmartGov addresses the importance of good governance and the need to engage citizens as well as public sector staff in decision-making and planning in order to reflect and react to local needs. It aims at bringing citizens and local governments together to address and solve issues facing citizens on a daily basis. Unfortunately, authorities lack the resources and platforms to do so. SmartGov addresses this gap by providing municipalities with a digital platform that facilitates access to information, consultation, participatory budgeting, and management of citizen and staff responses. The platform will incorporate features that empower citizens and increase transparency of the decision-making process as well as improve the efficiency of decision making and solution implementation of municipalities. Baladi is a cross-platform portal comes along with e-municipality services such as e-forms, e-complaints and other e-services.Baladi offers two roles for governments: one as accepting feedback from citizens (users) and integrating that feedback in the form of real-time change to policies and programs. The second model involves government opening aspects of its policy making suite of tools and engaging civil society in those individual stages. SmartGov conduct rigorous social science research to contextualize the development and implementation of our technology solutions to ensure ownership and adoption by citizens, municipal staff, and council leadership.
Challenges:
Lack of structured platforms to engage citizens in policy-making and service delivery.
Solution:
Baladi is the extent to which local authorities use technologies and data to harness the creativity of people in groups and create collaboration to jointly address policy challenges.
Results
Under the flagship of our “Algorithms for Democracy” program and after a series of intensive research held on different levels; Municipal, civil society mobilization, citizen-centricity, democratic theories and digital technologies. Our early findings helped us to understand the context in-depth to curate groundbreaking collaborative governance technology, although the research and product development phase are constant and ongoing.
Respectively, the current phase has helped SmartGov to develop an MVP (minimum valuable product) of its cross-platform application “Baladi” which fully digitized all of the good governance efforts and projects held over decades into a single interoperable digital platform.
While the research and development are still continuing, we are currently demonstrating our technology with partners and stakeholders to reach a ready-to-launch version.
Anyone is welcome to view our current live demo and give feedback by sending a request to info@smartgov.tech
We will keep on updating this section constantly each time we have new updates.
