This consultation has ended. To read the summary, please go here.
In the face of this growing mistrust among the citizenry, what is the role of technology and what do local governments have to do?
Citizen engagement through technology is especially powerful at the local government level. In this context, we have seen the rise in the use of mobile apps related to the provisioning of basic services, such as suspicious activity alerts, garbage pickup, pothole fixing, etc.
However, we are also keenly aware that technology is only an instrument, and unless carefully woven into the existing mechanisms through which citizens and governments interact, it can be irrelevant, at best, or even damaging to the social fabric. What if an app creates citizen demands that the government has no capacity to respond to? How to avoid building a technology solution that has a regressive effect, increasing the voice of some, while making the voice of others even harder to hear?
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Many thanks to all for your engagement and contributions during the last 4 weeks. It has been a very stimulating discussion with lots of great food for thought!
Below is a brief summary of inputs received during the last week (Week 4), organized by question.
Participants once again highlighted technology as potential enhancer of government action across of all of the Sustainable Development Goals.
One issue that was specifically highlighted was the importance for individual citizens and other stakeholders to be actively involved in shaping the overall parameters of digital systems - i.e. what technology is used for and on what terms, as opposed to being just users. Another issue that was highlighted was the need for oversight (including citizen oversight) to prevent misuses.
Threats the right to privacy, the risk of security breaches in digitalized systems, technology´s potential to deepen inequality and the scope for information manipulation were mentioned among the main risks related to technology-based state-citizen interfaces. An opportunity that came up in various interventions was the potential for technology to enable new and more effective forms of participation, thus increasing the legitimacy of public decision making
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Read summaries of the previous weeks of the consultation: