The Citizens Foundation is an Icelandic non-profit organization focused on developing and promoting tools for citizen democracy worldwide>.
They write that:
“All the software it creates is released as open source which anybody can use for free. The Citizens Foundation is and will be a neutral entity whose main objective is to foster collaboration between people and their politicians.”
“The Citizens Foundation (website: www.citizens.is) promotes democracy online. Like most Icelandic citizens, Gunnar Grimsson and Robert Bjarnason, the Citizens Foundation founders, took part in the online drafting of a new Icelandic constitution. The Icelandic ‘Shadow Parliament’ and a ‘Better Reykjavik’ are two successful online platforms developed by the foundation to encourage dialogue and debate amongst Iceland’s citizens and their representatives.
Gunnar Grimsson stated: “We sincerely hope that the open active democracy platforms we developed, our own experiences and not least the lessons learned from Iceland’s history will contribute to further improve transparency and democracy around the world.” Robert Bjarnason, his colleague, continued: “It is our sincere belief that the kind of software we developed can make a difference where people really want to debate, prioritize or discuss ideas that contribute to a better democracy”.”
The Your Priorities @ www.yrpri.org is one of their key initiatives:
“This is a global service by the Citizens Foundation. The service will provide a website for every country in the world under the yrpri.org domain.
Using Open Active Democracy software developed by the Citizens Foundation and others, people can add new ideas, add arguments for and against priorities, indicate if they support or oppose an idea, create a personal list of priorities and discuss all priorities. The end results are lists of top priorities in many categories as well as the best arguments for and against each priority.
At launch we plan to offer the following interface languages: Icelandic, English, French, German and Arabic. This is a call out for volunteers to assist in translating to those and other languages. We are also looking for help in developing and testing the software and translations.
Our plan is to launch this service on the 15. April 2011. Only people that are physically located in a given country can help prioritise issues for that country. Example web addresses will be world.yrpri.org, tunisia.yrpri.org, egypt.yrpri.org, france.yrpri.org and iceland.yrpri.org.”
Watch the video introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2oLlzPqt_pQ#!