Your Priorities

= We believe the people of the world need good online democracy tools to collectively find and choose their top priorities. And together discover which priorities they want to pressure their politicians to implement and in what order.

URL = http://www.yrpri.org

Description

1.

"In 2008 Robert Bjarnason and Gunnar Grimsson developed Your Priorities, a platform that enables groups of people to debate and prioritise policy ideas, budget decisions and micro-issues affecting their neighbourhood. The best ideas, with the most support, are elevated to the top and actioned on. In Reykjavik, Iceland, up to 40% of citizens use the platform and the city council has committed itself to discussing and implementing the most popular ideas on monthly basis." (http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/feb/28/ten-digital-social-innovators-online)

2.

"This is a global service by the Citizens Foundation. The service will provide a website for every country in the world under the yrpri.org domain.

Using Open Active Democracy software developed by the Citizens Foundation and others, people can add new ideas, add arguments for and against priorities, indicate if they support or oppose an idea, create a personal list of priorities and discuss all priorities. The end results are lists of top priorities in many categories as well as the best arguments for and against each priority.

At launch we plan to offer the following interface languages: Icelandic, English, French, German and Arabic. This is a call out for volunteers to assist in translating to those and other languages. We are also looking for help in developing and testing the software and translations.

Our plan is to launch this service on the 15. April 2011. Only people that are physically located in a given country can help prioritise issues for that country. Example web addresses will be world.yrpri.org, tunisia.yrpri.org, egypt.yrpri.org, france.yrpri.org and iceland.yrpri.org."

History

"Out of the financial and political crisis in Iceland 2008 a small group of people came together to develop technology to empower citizens to find their top democratic priorities and arguments in order to influence their politicians.

The first version of Open Active Democracy opened as Skuggaþing (Shadow Parliament) in January 2009 and Betri Reykjavík (Better Reykjavik) launched in May 2010. In the beginning of 2010 Open Active Democracy was merged with the Nationbuilder software by Jim Gilliam.

In the 2010 municipal elections in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, almost 10% of the voting population took part in the majority talks of two parties via a website called Betri Reykjavik (Better Reykjavik). We are now working with the City of Reykjavik on an improved user interface and integration with the Reykjavik city administrative system to ensure priorities are processed by city officials. New version opens end of April 2011.

Other projects include a collaborative website for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Iceland concerning the Icelandic application to the European Union which will give the general public a chance to state their opinions. Also a grant application website for the Ministry of Education in Iceland where the grant appliers rate which projects are chosen and a Stjórnarskrá (Constitution) website to give the public a platform to voice and grade their ideas for a new constitution.

More Information

Contact

● Gunnar Grímsson - CEO - [email protected] - +354 8978229

● Robert Bjarnason - CTO - [email protected]