CItizen Voices
Citizen Voices is an innovation based on the idea of civic journalism and deliberative discussion groups to deal with different topics of public interest such as security and coexistence, education, territorial order or elections, with the primary goal of promoting citizen participation. This innovation was created in 1998 by researchers from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de Medellín (UPB) and various mass media, in order to work with ordinary citizen on these media. The innovation seeks out citizens, without political aspirations, and brought together by thei consumption of news through mass media, differing from those usually involved in civil society events. The goal is that each project is carried out at the local level, although two have been developed at the national level in the subjects of Displacement and of the Ten Year Plan of Education. This process has sought to transform the problem of the public's identification with the state exclusively, and the traditional exclusion of the citizen from the conception of general interest, public policies and decision making that affect the citizenry. Each project, organized around a theme of public interest, consists of seven phases and lasts approximately five months. In the first two phases questions are asked through the media to citizens to respond openly by telephone or email. Then there are about five citizen talks with 12 to 15 people who have responded and are interested in attending in-person conversations, from which media reports are presented to bring the results back to citizenship in set. The final objective of these conclusions is the realization of citizen agendas, which are constructed with citizens representing the discussion groups and the coordinators of the university, to be delivered to the local or national authorities. In the last phase a mainly journalistic follow-up is conducted.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- not backed by constitution nor legislation, nor by any governmental policy or program
- Frequency
- single
- Mode of selection of participants
- both
- Type of participants
- citizens
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a non-binding decision
- Co-Governance
- no
Means
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Ends
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