What solution models are needed to meet the future challenges of the city of Vienna? Guided by this question, the Green Party Vienna decided in summer 2021 to develop a new policy program under the slogan “Your idea becomes program”. Together with the Viennese population, experts, representatives from science, NGOs and civil society, fundamental questions of city life as well as relevant topics for the future were to be addressed in various participation formats. A core element of the process was the online survey via the CrowdInsights platform gruene-wien.mitdenken.online.
Over a period of ten weeks, the Viennese population could contribute to the process on the digital platform and answer the following three questions:
- What do you consider to be the big and small unsolved problems of our time?
- What would a Vienna of your dreams look like? What would you implement if you had the power to do so?
- What do you like and what bothers you when you move through Vienna on familiar paths?
In total, more than 2,000 answers were received on the Mitdenken platform, which were evaluated within a few days by CrowdInsights as the service provider in the platform’s AI-supported analysis tool. For this purpose, the essential core statements of the answers were first isolated either by the participants themselves or subsequently by CrowdInsights and assigned to thematic clusters. The special thing about this was that the answers to all three questions paid off in the same area of knowledge and thus made it possible to highlight expectations, problems and possible solutions in a bundled way. In an editorial process, a list of 13 findings was then extracted from the thematic clusters and published on the platform for all to see and understand in a transparent manner.
The party executive of the Greens Vienna wrote a statement on each of these findings, which was also published on the Mitdenken platform. In addition, all registered participants were informed by a personally customised but automatically generated e-mail about the influence their own contribution had on the results.
For the Greens of Vienna, the online participation was the first step on the way to their new Basic Program and the discussion basis for further participation formats. In concrete terms, the Greens formed nine thematic areas (also called “TikTaks”) that could be derived from the findings. All participants in the online participation were invited by email to take part in the kick-off event and to participate in one of the nine TikTaks. In this way, the community gained on gruene-wien.mitdenken.online could also be used for further participation offers of the Greens.