PUBLICATION

Digital Participation Online Training & Digital Participation Chapter of Participation Playbook—Essential Resources for Digital Democracy

Do you want to use digital platforms or tools to facilitate citizen participation in your participatory programs, but don't know where to start or are discouraged by the many technology problems that keep popping up when you finally start trying?

The Digital Participation Online Training and the Digital Participation Chapter of the Participation Playbook are here to help!

The Digital Participation Online Training and the Digital Participation Chapter of the Participation Playbook are developed by Peopled Powered - our partner and a global hub for participatory democracy. Since 2023, we have been working with them to update the training, and in 2024, we were honoured to support them to develop the Digital Participation Chapter of their Participation Playbook. Innovation for democracy is one of the pillars of our hub topics, so we believe that technology and digitalization should not only make people's lives easier, but should also be turned into a strength to foster our democracy. And the training and the playbook fit right in.

Let's see how they can help you:

The training is a series of online courses consisting of four key topics - the stages you need to go through if you want to use digital platforms in your participatory programs. They are:

1. What is digital participation?

2. How to choose a digital participation platform?

3. How to set up a digital participation platform?

4. How to run a program with a digital participation platform?

The four steps outline a clear roadmap for people who are at the beginning stages of using digital tools, and people can learn more and check what they need to learn after they start taking these courses.

The training is designed to be accessible, interactive, sustainable, and motivating. It's free of charge and offers automatic translation into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Traditional Chinese. Because the training is online, anyone with an Internet connection can access it anytime, anywhere.

The training also includes exercise sections that encourage users to upload their participatory program ideas or thoughts via text, image, or video files. There is also a comment section where other users can leave messages and comments to share feedback on their learning. If users would like to apply for mentorship support, People Powered also provides contact information for inquiries.

Users can select any chapter to start and can save their progress to restart next time. After all the courses are complemented, they will receive a certificate as an encouragement.

The Training is not produced as an isolated and individual training material; it is well connected to other People Powered resources on participatory democracy.  It has been integrated into the People Powered Online Learning Portal, which includes a series of comprehensive courses that cover from the basics of participatory democracy, best practices from around the world, to how to ensure the participation of youth, women, displaced people, and vulnerable groups. This training is also linked to People Powered's Participatory Playbook, so you can apply what you learn in the training to create your own participatory playbook right away.

The Participation Playbook is designed to help people who want to start their own participatory programs create their work plans - just like writing a playbook. The topics it covers may be similar to the training, but it's more like a practical planning tool that people can use. It consists of four sets of self-checking questions to help users assess and review what needs to be done, and after users answer all the questions, the Playbook System will structure their answers in the format of a playbook. Users can download it as a draft work plan and adjust it according to their needs.

The topics of the four sets of self-checking questions include:

1. Is digital participation right for your participation program? 

2. Designing your digital participation program; 

3. Choosing your digital participation platform; 

4. Running your digital participation program.

And the self-check questions under these four topics are created by the participatory democracy experts and practitioners from around the world that People Powered has invited. They have distilled their experience and knowledge into these questions to help people navigate the journey of creating their own playbook for using digital platforms to engage with citizens.

People without a technology background will benefit greatly from this playbook. Many technology issues and problems often arise when we start a participatory program, and it's normal that we do not to know which one we should prioritize. The playbook has

identified key technology issues that people need to consider, so they do not waste time or become demotivated from continuing their program. For example, these key issues include: where your digital platform will be hosted, how much technical support will be needed, where data will be stored, and whether cybersecurity and privacy will be met. The Playbook also suggests a reasonable estimate of the budget and staffing plan you will need to run your digital participation platforms based on the experience of global participatory democracy practitioners.

The Playbook is available in English with automatic translation into Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.