2024 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

Comunitat311 (External link) came about as a response to the need to undertake new actions to promote citizen participation policies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The original idea of the project is to promote communication, exchange and collaborative work among municipal professionals in the province of Barcelona, in the field of citizen participation and all those technical teams that promote processes or manage participatory spaces with citizens.

The Communitat311 aims to respond to a series of specific objectives:

• Encourage the exchange of experiences between local authorities and the construction of collaborative knowledge.
• Identify and disseminate innovative practices of citizen participation at local or supra-local level.
• Promote transversal and collaborative work with other institutions and organisations in the field of citizen participation.
• Raise awareness of other institutions and organisations in the field of citizen participation.
• Promote the Internet and digital technologies as spaces for the production of local policies.
• Publicise and encourage the use of digital tools that enable new spaces for opinion, deliberation, proposals and decision-making.
• Ensure the democratic quality of the digital mechanisms used in the framework of local government action.

The creation and design of the community was carried out in a participatory manner. Working sessions were organised with technical teams of citizen participation in the territory and with the technical team of participation of the Diputació de Barcelona.

At the end of 2022, an evaluation and review of the project was carried out after detecting that it was not meeting expectations. Based on a diagnosis with the participation of the users, a new proposal for the design and organisation of the contents and a new linking and engagement strategy were drawn up.

At the beginning of 2023, the new image of the project, the spaces and channels of interaction were presented and actions such as the Community Calls (External link) (online deliberative sessions) were initiated, informal spaces for periodical meetings to discuss topics of interest with the aim of sharing experiences and reinforcing the collaborative work network.

• https://www.youtube.com/@Participacio-DIBA (External link)