With Maptionnaire’s community engagement tool, Lahti managed to organise the whole process digitally. Before the process started, the city agreed on the budget used for the process and established a digital hub for the PB project where citizens will submit their ideas, vote, and hear updates about the process.
Phase one.
Citizens were asked to tell the City about their ideas related to the themes of wellbeing, environment, community, or children/teens. The ideas had to be non-commercial and realistic for the City to implement and maintain (so no unicorn parks or time-traveling machines allowed, sadly).
The City also chose 12 volunteers to serve as PB partners. The partners are ordinary citizens from different areas in Lahti whose task was to support the project in their area.
Phase two.
Coordinators evaluated the submitted ideas and choose the ones with the most potential to be developed further in workshops with citizens.
Phase three.
Citizens started voting for the best proposals. The ideas had been divided between the four major areas of the city, with each area having a budget of 40,000€ to spend. The remaining 40,000€ was to be spent on proposals for the entire city. Citizens could vote via a Maptionnaire survey or if they preferred to vote on paper, they could do so in the local libraries.
Phase four.
The implementation of the winning proposals.