Argentina
Since 2020
The Municipality of Rosario has implemented a new digital platform to promote and organise citizen participation in the city.
The citizens of Rosario
Rosario, a city located in the southeast of the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, is the administrative centre of the department that bears its name. It stands out as the most populous city within the province and the third largest in size nationally.
Along with several neighbouring localities, it is part of the Rosario Metropolitan Area, which according to the 2010 census is home to 1,691,880 inhabitants. This area includes Greater Rosario, which is the third largest urban conglomerate in the country, with a population of 1,236,089 people, as well as the department of Rosario itself. It is estimated that by 2021 the population of the Rosario department, which includes the city of Rosario and 23 other municipalities, will reach 1,399,364 inhabitants, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC).
The Municipality of Rosario launched in 2020 the open source citizen participation platform known as "Decidim". This initiative, promoted by the Secretariat of Modernisation and Proximity, aims to take advantage of a digital tool that is internationally recognised for its ability to facilitate collective decision-making processes adapted to new urban realities.
With this measure, the municipality relaunched the Rosario Participa portal , created in 2016 to stimulate more active and dynamic citizen participation. This renewal seeks to integrate participation processes in both the virtual and face-to-face spheres, a need that has become more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rosario sees citizen participation as a two-way dialogue that now takes place in both the physical and digital worlds. She recognises the importance of having the right tools to facilitate this process and observes the evolution of this form of interaction. Decidim, as an innovative platform, allows for a deepening of participation, facing the challenge of guaranteeing it virtually during the pandemic. It also offers the possibility of creating new spaces and mechanisms for networking, thus generating an agenda of interesting topics for collective construction.
This implementation brings Rosario in line with other cities around the world that value citizen participation, such as Barcelona, Helsinki, Mexico City and Nancy, among others.
Among the advantages of this platform is the ability to create dynamic collaborative processes for each new participation initiative. It also increases levels of transparency by giving greater visibility to the processes, and offers citizens multiple resources to analyse, evaluate and improve the participation tools with their contributions. In addition, it allows data uploading and permanent access to key information, such as the progress and stages of the different participation processes, including the agenda of neighbourhood councils and other spaces for collective decision-making. Finally, it makes it possible to carry out public consultations, both on management initiatives and on those raised by various groups of citizens interested in exploring specific issues in greater depth.
Sources of information (in Spanish)
Digital platform "Rosario Participa"
Decidim
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