The Open Government Partnership has ranked the top ten initiatives in citizen engagement, with Denmark, Montenegro and the Philippines making up the top three.

The Philippines came third for its participatory budgeting programme. The programme is implemented across all local governments, which allows civil society organisations to help choose funding priorities, and the national government is committing over US$300,000 for each city to implement projects identified through the participatory projects.

Montenegro came in second for involving citizens in reporting unregulated economic activities. The government launched a campaign to get citizens to use a mobile app called ‘Be Responsible’ and also other channels like website and toll-free hotline to report illegal activities.

Smartphone users could take photos of fake cash register receipts or black market goods and report them anonymously to authorities.

Denmark was recognised in first place for its elected councils of senior citizens in local governments. Local government councils are legally required to consult with their local senior citizen councils before making decisions on any issues relevant to the elderly population, including health care, traffic planning, local infrastructure, cultural policy, and public services for the elderly and disabled.

Italy’s open budget project ‘OpenCoesione’ came in fourth place. Citizens can track projects being funded by local and national governments on a website, specifically projects committed to helping less developed regions of the country. These projects received an annual funding of EUR15 billion.

Citizen engagement projects from The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Mexico, Peru, United States and France came in the top 10 as well.

While the Netherlands is involving citizens in property valuation to promote tax transparency, Britain is holding dialogues with the public to drive decisions on science and technology. In a Mexican city, citizens can report security issues on a dedicated platform which also maps conversations happening on Twitter.

A district in Peru is involving children and adolescents to submit considerations for local public policies. In the US, the National Archives has been crowdsourcing historical government records from citizens since 2012.

France’s open data portal data.gouv.fr is the first goverment portal open to contributions by anyone. Users can vote for useful datasets, improve the data already shared by agencies and post their own data visualisations and apps on the website.

By: Medha Basu

Original Source: http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/4364