Citizens Foundation - Wikipedia
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This Wikipedia article describes the Citizens Foundation, an Icelandic nonprofit focused on electronic collaborative democracy tools. It is tangentially relevant to AI safety only insofar as participatory governance platforms relate to democratic oversight mechanisms, but has no direct AI safety content.
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Summary
The Citizens Foundation is an Icelandic nonprofit that develops open-source digital democracy tools, including Better Reykjavík and Your Priorities, enabling citizens to collaboratively propose and vote on policy ideas. Founded after the 2008 financial crash, it pioneered crowdsourced constitutional drafting and participatory municipal governance. Its platforms have been used in Reykjavík's city governance and internationally.
Key Points
- •Founded in Iceland post-2008 financial crisis to develop electronic collaborative democracy software.
- •Created Better Reykjavík platform, used as an integral part of Reykjavík city governance for citizen policy input.
- •Developed 'Your Priorities', an international participatory democracy platform.
- •Shadow Parliament project allowed Icelandic citizens to engage with parliamentary proposals online.
- •Demonstrates practical implementation of crowdsourced governance and digital civic participation.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Citizens Foundation [ 1 ] is a non-profit organization based in Reykjavík , Iceland, and founded under Icelandic law [ 2 ] [ 3 ] to promote electronic collaborative democracy around the globe and to develop the software needed for that purpose. [ 4 ] The organization got its start when citizens were asked to crowdsource their constitution in 2010. [ 5 ] In 2013 the foundation created the award-winning platform Better Reykjavík in collaboration with the Best party . [ 6 ] [ 7 ]
History
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Its formation can be traced back to the Icelandic financial crash in 2008 when development of the software started although the Foundation itself wasn't formally founded until 2010. [ citation needed ] The main focus has been on developing a web based democracy tool called Open Active Democracy (OAD) [ 8 ] [ non-primary source needed ] which it uses for its democracy building projects which are: Better Reykjavík , [ 9 ] [ non-primary source needed ] Shadow Parliament [ 10 ] [ non-primary source needed ] (Iceland only) and the international project Your Priorities . [ 11 ] [ non-primary source needed ]
Projects
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Shadow Parliament (Skuggaþing) opened formally in February 2010, [ 12 ] imports all proposals from the Icelandic Parliament ( Alþingi ) [ 13 ] and enables citizens to choose which proposals they support or oppose as well as allowing them to put forward their own proposals. The system received acclaim from the Icelandic blogosphere [ 14 ] [ 15 ] and over 2,000 citizens took part in using the system, [ 16 ] including by individual members of the Parliament. [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] [ 20 ]
A few months later, on 25 May 2010, the website Shadow City (Skuggaborg) opened, a few days before the municipal elections in Icelands capital, Reykjavík with all parties running in the election given their own section for promotion and usage. [ 21 ] The website was received with acclaim by the Best Party whose supporters used it extensively for their proposals and ideas. [ 22 ] The Best Party won the elections [ 23 ] and started majority negotiations with the Social Democratic Alliance . The parties asked the founders of Skuggaborg to create a special area on the website called Better Reykjavík for the citizens to help them create a majority agreement. [ 24 ] [ 25 ] [ 26 ] In 3 days the number of users had reached almost 3.000 with over 400 ideas and 873 points for and against those ideas. [ 27 ] One news site referred to this as "A flood of ideas about a Better Reykjavík". [ 28 ] In their majority agreement the parties said: The website Better Reykjavík will be used as support in decision making and policy formulation [ 29 &#
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