The CODIGI BV app is designed to facilitate bottom-up communication and decision-making between citizens and decision-makers in Brasov, Romania. It aims to identify societal challenges that can be addressed through digital solutions and enable co-creation of those solutions. The app provides transparency and traceability regarding the implementation status of solutions and the positions or arguments of the local council and municipality.
For citizens, the app allows them to report and present challenges through a web platform. They can provide a description of the problem, location information, and even attach a photo. The platform enables collecting feedback from the community in the form of votes. The most voted challenges are brought to the monthly discussions of the Digital Council. Through the app, the Digital Council can distribute links for virtual public consultations or, when the epidemiological situation allows, announce the location and time of physical public consultations on specific societal challenges. During these events, both the Digital Council and citizens involved in civic initiatives can discuss and co-create solutions by structuring the debate as a moderated brainstorming session.
The viable solutions co-created by the Digital Council specialists and civil society will be proposed to decision-makers.
The app allows citizens to track the status of challenges and solutions in terms of their implementation by authorities.
It also provides rankings of the most important identified elements.
The concept of participatory digital innovation, where citizens drive digital innovation based on their needs and identified problems, is embraced for the first time in Brasov.
From a technical perspective, the application will cater to two types of users: citizens and administrative staff. Citizens can post issues on the platform, providing a description and the option to add a photo. The most voted complaints will be discussed by the administrative board. If approved by the citizens through voting, the administrative staff will propose a solution, which will then be implemented.
The app’s functionalities include:
For citizens:
- User interface
- Log-in system (with email or social media account)
- Adding a challenge
- Text fields for location, problem severity, a brief description, and the citizen’s initial proposed solution
- Image upload
- Viewing other challenges proposed by citizens through paginated information
- Voting system for challenges on the platform
- Classification and ranking system for challenges
- Contact form to address questions or suggestions to the Digital Council
- Updates on challenges (in the form of articles) and their status
- Information about debate and co-creation meetings (virtual meeting links or physical meeting locations and times)
For Digital Council members:
- Admin interface
- Dashboard to display statistical data (number of challenges created, resolved, top voted challenges)
- Log-in system
- Viewing existing challenges through paginated information
- Filtering new challenges proposed by civil society
- System for managing challenges (approval, deletion, and resolution). Challenges need to be approved by at least one Digital Council member to prevent linguistic profanities, duplicate challenges, or irrelevant content.
- Updating challenges with explanatory articles and their status
- Disseminating information about Council meetings
- Exporting challenge data in Excel/CSV format