Website Analysis

Often, what a website actually does is what other websites say about it (their own statements about themselves may be exaggerated).

• https://democraciaos.org/en/
• https://www.civis.vote/
• https://www.citizens.is/
  • Github: https://github.com/CitizensFoundation
  • https://betrireykjavik.is/domain/1 (Better Reykjavík) - (online since 2010) "Better Reykjavik is an online platform for the crowdsourcing of solutions to urban challenges. ... Innovations include a unique debating system, crowd-sourcing of content and prioritization, submission of multimedia content, and extensive use of AI to improve the user experience as well as content submitted. ... It’s a platform for crowdsourcing solutions to urban challenges and has multiple democratic functions: Agenda setting, Participatory budgeting, and Policymaking. .... Participation has increased steadily with new records reached almost every year. This 450 million ISK (4.2 million USD, 3.6 million EUR) participatory budgeting initiative enables the public to spend approximately 6% of the city’s capital investment budget."
    • When their name is searched in Google, their twitter comes up and it only has 38 followers and no posts.
    • Here's a sample page: https://www.betrireykjavik.is/group/3743 -- English Translation had to be activated and I had to login.
    • Seems like people can submit ideas, here's an example: https://www.betrireykjavik.is/post/38680 - The posting always asks them to submit answers to two questions "What do you want done?" and "why". People are able to vote yes or no for an idea and add a comment with it, which can also include a 30 sec audio or video clip. In a 'Debate' section, people can upvote or downvote other people's comments. There's a place to upload photos. Bad points: No dates are displayed on the ideas or comments so we cant tell if a comment is 5 years old or 5 days old.
    • (summary of analysis; important points) Basically this is a simple website, with just idea creation and allowing upvoting by other people and at this point we wonder if that is all there is. They also talked about participatory budgeting. Unable to see it so lets see.
    • Interesting idea that had some opposition with written comments: https://www.betrireykjavik.is/post/26876 -- this tells us that its not enough to just oppose an idea but provide a comment for it too.
    • (may be good to take a break while analyzing a website)
    • Another website confirms that this website is only for Ideas (and not participatory budgeting) - https://reykjavik.is/betri-reykjavik-0
    • One key feature is that Ideas are grouped by 'Communities' (makes sense to invite people to submit ideas on a certain topic). Otherwise all ideas would be submitted into a single group which would make it hard to organize and search etc, and we expect some kind of categorization of the Ideas
    • Indeed, the final summary is that this is just a website for Idea submission and commenting on them. Its possible that the govt of the city takes the ideas and funds the most popular ones (hence their claim of participatory budgeting). So it seems to be clear that the claims made on the original website are more than what is actually happening on the website. Its true that the website could be facilitating some of the stuff happening outside of the website but it is not happening on the website (for example there's no direct built-in budget management function).
    • The same exact platform is used for other purposes such as for "Icelandic Constitution Crowdsourcing" - https://stjornarskra-2019.betraisland.is/group/2102 -- Once again people submit ideas and can comment on it (that is all). Another interesting controversial topic with significant amount of support and opposition
    • Example of a US based implementation - https://enjine.smarter.nj.gov/group/6 - once again its the same platform so this confirms that this is all it is. Various countries are using it (with mostly light usage). That site is linked from the NJ website. This shows us the great potential of websites like this which are actually relatively simple. And all of them can be combined into one domain with differentiation based on location (instead of having separate websites for every location or purpose)
    • Went back to the main website to find out if there was anything else and yes this confirms it: https://citizens.is/getting-started/
    • Another summary: People are trying to submit ideas on various topics and their comments are recorded and upvoted. And the website displays the top ideas and the top comments. That is all.
    • Its also interesting to see what the NJ website is saying about this platform they're using - https://smarter.nj.gov/enjine/stage-one-ideas.html -- again this confirms its all about "ideas" (a search of that word brings up 16 occurrences on that page)
    • There could be several ways to improve this platform and add a lot of functionality to it (in the end, the sum of all improvements will go towards the design of our own website)
    • Sounds like the main Github of this website is at: https://github.com/CitizensFoundation/your-priorities-app (the github is linked on top of the main website https://www.citizens.is/ ). Description of this app is "Your Priorities is a citizen engagement platform, a progressive web app, and a participatory social network that empowers groups of any size to speak with one voice and organize around ideas." - so that is the real description of the core software
  • The shortest summary for this would be: Their product (open source) is basically just for submitting Ideas, upvoting them, commenting on the ideas and upvoting those comments as well. Its used in various locations. They all look the same.