Trying different democratic methods on Citizen Space
The challenge
Bristol, the most populous city in South West England, is known for its independent spirit, from the longest chain of independent shops in Europe to its own community currency. Bristol City Council sought to involve their citizenry in creative democratic exercises that reflected this character.
The council wanted to run different forms of participatory democracy: a citizens' panel for ongoing engagement with a large group of residents contributing views regularly, and a citizens' assembly for focused, deliberative discussion on specific issues. Both approaches are based on randomly selected, demographically representative samples of citizens, helping to ensure engagement with those often unheard and under-represented in decision making.
They needed a platform that could host both methods of engagement, make it easy for citizens to sign up and participate, provide visibility into the democratic process, and serve as an archive of past activity and outcomes.
The approach
Bristol City Council used Citizen Space to host both their citizens' panel and citizens' assembly.
Citizens' panel: Bristol's panel was an online group of nearly 1,400 Bristolians who contributed their views around four times a year on a wide range of issues, plus an annual survey to help the council improve services and make the city a better place to live. The panel enabled the council to engage with the public outside of formal consultations and gather opinions that reflected the views of different communities. Anyone could apply to join via a sign-up page on Citizen Space, and results from surveys going back more than 10 years were hosted on a dedicated section of the council's consultation hub.
Citizens' assembly: Bristol's citizens' assembly ran over a few weeks, with 60 citizens meeting online over four weekends to discuss how the city could recover from Covid-19. Participants were split into groups to consider three topics: climate change, transport and health. Citizen Space's configurable hub hosted a citizens' assembly home page plus a section for each of the three topics, enabling participants to bookmark the page for return visits.
The results
Following presentations and discussions, the assembly made 17 recommendations underpinned by 82 actions. The site remained online after completion for anyone to view the video presentations and recommendations report, along with information about next steps.
Hosting different methods of public engagement on one platform gave Bristol City Council a central hub for all democratic activity, adding visibility and accountability to the democratic process and allowing Bristolians to stay informed about how their views were being taken into account.
The platform made it convenient for admins to build, publish, manage and analyse both ongoing panel surveys and time-limited assembly work in one place, whilst providing an accessible archive of more than 10 years of citizens' panel results and assembly outcomes for public reference.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.