In Reykjavik citizens can use the Better Reykjavik platform to submit ideas on anything from school opening times to new playgrounds.
The Reykjavik city council has committed to debating the most popular ideas from Better Reykjavik website and discuss whether there is enough political backing to implement them. So far, almost 60 per cent of citizens have used the platform, and the city has spent €1.9 million on developing more than 200 projects based on ideas from citizens.
Better Reykjavik is a built on Your Priorities, a web-based platform developed by the Icelandic Citizens Foundation. The platform enables groups of people to develop and prioritise ideas and decide which ones to implement.
Since 2008, the Citizens Foundation has used Your Priorities to promote online, democratic debate in Iceland and worldwide. The open source platform is available free of charge to any group, city or country around the world interested in using it to source ideas from citizens.
Another prominent use of the platform has been in Estonia where 50,000 citizens used it to submit more than 2,000 proposals to government. Fifteen were taken forward to parliament, and seven have since become Estonian law.