Your Priorities is a tool for citizen engagement designed to gather feedback on a variety of different topics. It allows users to post and vote on different ideas, and can be used in a variety of ways from identifying problems for the government to fix, to brainstorming ideas for new policies and initiatives to implement. The tool can be used by a government, political party, or civil society organization to gather citizen feedback and facilitate discussion and deliberation on policy issues.
The tool allows for engaging with people on a topic and crowdsourcing ideas. While it's designed with government engagement in mind, any organization can use it for generating ideas, or collecting and prioritizing issues to bring to the government's attention. Users can vote on submissions, and list reasons for and against each idea. The administrator can choose to turn on features such as statuses to track the review and implementation of ideas, or geolocation to provide a map where issues are occurring. While it does have a fair amount of customization, it's not designed to be as robust and complex as some government engagement platforms like Decidim.
Your Priorities is a free and light-weight way to engage citizens on issues of concern to them. The platform is highly customizable to fit a wide variety of use cases, while still being fairly simple and straightforward for both administrators and users. It is an effective way to begin engaging citizens and crowdsourcing ideas.
Use Case/Case study
NDI has only begun implementing YourPriorities, but it has been successfully used throughout Iceland where it was created, as well as in the United States and throughout Europe by groups like the Scottish Parliament and Maltese political parties. These and other case studies can be viewed on the YourPriorities website.
Budget for implementing
Anyone can set up a community for free at yrpri.org with the full functionality of the tool. For bigger governments and larger entities with sufficient funds that are looking for a high level of support and attention from the developers, paid support is available starting at around $400 a month.
Technical capacity required
The tool can be used by anyone at yrpri.org without needing any advanced technical capacity, and is fairly easy to set up. While using the tool at yrpri.org is recommended, if an organization did for any reason want to host the platform themselves, the code is also available open-source.
Level of effort to implement
The tool is fairly easy to use and will not require a large amount of effort. A user should plan on taking several hours at the beginning to familiarize themselves with the tool, and also dedicate a fair amount of time to planning out what type of engagement they are looking for and what the desired end result is that they're looking to achieve. While the platform is active, the implementer should plan on spending an hour or two most days looking at responses, removing any inappropriate submissions, and providing any updates on the progress of initiatives as applicable.
Contextual Considerations
The platform provides automated translation into over 40 languages through integration with Google Translate, allowing individuals who speak multiple languages to interact. The tool was not designed with closed societies in mind.
Additional information
Several demos are available on the homepage of tool's creator at https://citizens.is, along with some basic tips on getting started.