"Better Reykjavík" and "My Neighbourhood" are online consultation forums where citizens are given an opportunity to present their ideas on issues regarding services, operations and infrastructure developments within the City of Reykjavík. Anyone can view the open forums and registered users who approve the terms of participation can participate. The forums are a collaboration between the city of Reykjavik and the Citizens Foundation, an Icelandic not for profit NGO.
"Better Reykjavik" is designed to allow citizens to participate and contribute to policy development by submitting and debating ideas for policy reform and service and operational improvements.
"My Neighbourhood" (previously "Better Neighbourhoods") is the annual participatory budgeting in Reykjavík that has been ongoing since 2011. 450m ISK (+3m EUR) is allocated by citizens each year to implement crowdsourced ideas from the citizens to improve the various neighbourhoods of Reykjavík. To date, 608 ideas have been approved (2012-2017) with thousands of citizens having had a real influence on their surroundings through the project. All the neighbourhoods of Reykjavík have been visibly improved through the "My Neighbourhood" participatory budgeting project, with citizens using "Your Priorities" to submit and debate ideas, and then "Open Active Voting" to allocate the budget. The "My Neighbourhood" project is the flagship of Citizens Foundation participatory budgeting projects, having been successfully executed since 2011 when formal collaboration with the City of Reykjavík began. The project has been written about in various international media and garnered a great deal of attention worldwide, winning numerous awards, including the Nordic Best Practice Challenge in 2015.
Speaker: Dr. Magnus Yngvi Josefsson is the city of Reykjavik´s research programme manager. He holds a PhD degree from the Centre for Poliy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Magnus will give a talk on Reykjavik´s experience of participatory democracy and participatory budgeting, but will also consider how this model can potentially be extended to involve citizens to a greater extent in the political process and policy development to address societal challenges.
Organizers: BRIDGE (Research group in Fisheries management, harvest technology and biology at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and Economics) and the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) Special Interest Group in Using qualitative data for informing behavioural rules in agent based modelling (Qual2Rule).