Online democracy services are used widely within the administration and by the citizens and CSOs.
Online citizens’ initiative has reached wide scale citizens’ awareness and participation. 6 initiatives have reached parliament and many have received wide-scale public visibility. The citizens' initiative has constitutional support and therefore actual influence on the political agenda. Being able to participate online makes campaigning without big budgets possible for grass-roots citizens’ movements. Before the collection of physical signatures required too much resources. Unlike in any other country, the law proposals that reach the necessary support get full parliamentary proceedings, similar to government bills. Online citizens' initiative was opened in December 2012 and has so far activated more than 300 000 users per month. More than 500 000 people have signed one or more of the 246 initiatives made electronically. This is a high percentage in a country with a population of 5.4 million. Many of the citizens which have participated have previously been uninterested in politics.
Citizens, CSOs and media have found the services, therefore making active marketing efforts unnecessary.
Permanent State Secretaries have stated, that online democracy services should be used when drafting significant legislation. Civil servants both in government, and municipalities, have been educated on how to use these services.
All demokratia.fi (democracy.fi) services are centrally financed and can be used free of charge by government, municipalities, CSOs and citizens.
Policy Context
According to OECD study Governments at a Glance citizens’ trust in government in Finland is among the highest in OECD: 76% of citizens have confidence in national government. However, the percentage has decreased by 16 points in five years. Also polarisation of political and societal citizen participation has raised concern.
The problem is, how to get citizens aware of, and excited about, taking part in democratic processes and agenda setting on a mass scale. Need for the government to act directly in the field of eParticipation was seen as a solution to counteract the progressive reduction of citizens’ engagement in public affairs.
The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative law was issued in 2012 to launch a new form of democratic participation on the state level. The law states that Ministry of Justice must offer citizens’ initiative eService with strong electronic identification. The objective of offering an online service free of charge for launching and signing citizens’ initiatives was to ensure that there would be no thresholds for launching or signing initiatives.
Another central goal was to guarantee different forms and stages of democratic participation would be covered by democracy online services, hence Citizens’ initiative service was accompanied by other online democracy services
Description of target users and groups
The target is truly the whole population - all Finnish citizens, civil society organisations and enterprises. Civil servants in government and municipalities are also among the beneficiaries.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
The initiative’s goal is to enhance, and enable, dialog and interaction between citizens, politicians, and public servants, plus improve e-participation possibilities at a local and national level. The long-term objective is to build an ecosystem of e-services with commercial and non-profit add-on services complementing the services developed. The main objective is to foster citizens’ participation in public life and their engagement in political and legislative initiatives.
The Democracy online services consist of four parts: 1) www.kansalaisaloite.fi, a system for the electronic collection of signatures for citizen’s initiatives. 2) www.kuntalaisaloite.fi, a system for the electronic collection of signatures for initiatives to municipal authorities 3) www.otakantaa.fi, a channel for participation and interaction open to all. Consultations can be initiated by government, municipalities, CSOs, citizens. This tool is meant to be used at the very beginning of law-drafting process to collect citizens’ views. 4) www.lausuntopalvelu.fi, a service for responding electronically to an official statement process. This is to be used in law-drafting process when the draft of government proposal is officially open for consultation.
The building of these services is based on the active involvement of a variety of actors, such as state authorities, municipalities, joint municipal authorities, companies and third-sector organisations.
These services have been built with a customer-orientated approach. A customer panel, chosen from the participators of a competition to be part of the panel, and a developer community were utilized from stage one of building each service. Workshops were arranged for hacktivists and developers, giving them a chance to test the prototypes and give comments on service design, usability of the services, etc. The customer panel tested and gave feedback at certain checkpoints while building the new e-services. Stakeholders (CSOs, government organisations, municipalities, interested citizens) participated in the drafting of the services’ requirement specifications in preparation of the acquisition of the service, plus the Ministry of Justice held numerous open sessions to get feedback during the design- and implementation phase of the services, and arranged testing and presentation sessions open to all before the launch of the new services.
Main results, benefits and impacts
The initiative has brought modernized web-based tools and processes, a ‘toolbox’ easy to use for numerous players including citizens, associations, government agencies, municipalities and other ministries.
The actual outcome of the initiative is a big step forward. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were previously unengaged in politics, have participated in citizens’ initiatives. Six national citizens’ initiatives have reached the threshold required for parliamentary proceedings. Many initiatives have sparked public interest and deliberation. In addition, many municipalities have opened up their decision-making processes and asked for feedback via the otakantaa.fi-portal.
Citizens have created local initiatives to make suggestions on how to improve different matters in their own community. The municipal citizens’ initiative, which has been in legislation for long time has now reached a new level of activity, since collecting signatures is easy and cost-efficient even for small CSOs and citizens’ movements.
The ultimate beneficiaries have been Finnish citizens. Officials at government and municipal level have found the tools useful and have enjoyed taking on the challenge of getting closer to citizens in their preparatory processes. Civil Society Organisations have used the services to promote discussion on their current issues. National and local media have taken an interest in citizens initiatives, plus local media have also covered local initiatives and ongoing discussions in the otakantaa.fi-portal.
The Citizens’ Initiative service and the otakantaa.fi-portal have about 300 000 visitors/ month and the Local Initiatives service has about 30 000 visitors/ month.
Return on investment
The creation of online democracy services started as a pilot in year 2001 by the Ministry of Finance. The service included a consultation portal and online chats with ministers. The government launched a citizen participation policy- program in 2004. A small unit was founded in the Ministry of Justice and democracy services found a permanent home there. The government launched in 2009 eServices and eDemocarcy development program (SADe-programme), which gave a new boost to online democracy services.
The maintenance of these services requires the already active parties to carry on in the same manner. Central funding for the maintenance and development of these services has been secured.
The source code of kansalaisaloite.fi was opened as open source on github in January 2014 to promote openess and enable further use of the source code and to allow development ideas for the site. The service is maintained and updated based on input and ideas from users and developers
In spring 2014 Ministry of Justice Finland opened a questionnaire on kansalaisaloite.fi -webservice to collect feedback about the service and citizens’ initiative process. Almost 1000 respondents answered the questionnaire. The responses are taken into account when designing further development for the web portal.
Track record of sharing
-
Lessons learnt
-