The people of Unterschleißheim should have a greater say than before, participate in the discussion and have a say in what happens in their city. The public participation software “Consul”, which has a modular structure and can also be expanded with many functions, is intended to make this possible. And a first test run shows that some in the city also see themselves in a position to help the administration in the town hall with their ideas and suggestions. “Maybe it will help,” wrote a person from Unterschleissheim about the online start of the software, when the question was asked why citizens wanted to participate. A clear majority was in favor of strengthening citizen participation online and analogously, for example through meetings.
In Unterschleißheim, a lot has been going on in dialogue with the citizens for years. Until recently there was an e-citizen dialogue tool that anyone could use to report if a street lamp was broken or a garbage can threatened to overflow. The people of Unterschleißheim are used to voting on projects for participatory budgeting every year for which a budget is made available. The calisthenics training facility in Valentinspark is one such participatory budgeting project. Of course, that didn’t save the system from being demolished weeks ago by strangers. Citizens’ dialogue and active citizen participation should in any case be expanded, as Mayor Christoph Böck (SPD) emphasized in the main committee of the city council on Wednesday. “I am convinced that we will have to invest even more in the future in order to be able to involve our citizens.”
The Consul software was not the big cost factor, as city hall spokesman Steven Ahlrep said in the meeting. It is an open source software that was developed in Madrid and is now spreading fairly quickly because it is easy to use and offers many possibilities: This ranges from surveys to online voting to projects that are widely discussed and then a result should also be evaluated. Nevertheless, the town hall administration had and still has expenses. Because it is about integrating the software into other systems in the city, about training courses and, above all, about implementing what has been presented by the citizens.
And, as has been shown, this is time-consuming and ties up staff. In the past, some things got out of hand because the e-citizens’ dialogue was sometimes misunderstood and many personal concerns ended up in the town hall: How do you get an appointment at the registration office? What year was my home built? Such questions. Some complained about train cancellations or other annoyances and conflicts for which the city is not responsible. Such inquiries then had to be passed on to Deutsche Bahn or the police. Something like this should be contained with Consul with the module “Defect reporter”. A query tool is connected to this, which shows, for example, what has already been reported.
The core of the software should, however, be to professionalize the exchange with citizens, including on more complex topics. As requested in the survey, this should also take place more intensively in parallel, for example via the Lohhofer Anzeiger. 47 citizens registered for the Consul test run with an account and 38 of them took part in the survey. About 500 called the consul page. The participatory budgeting dialogue is embedded in the tool. The whole thing is to be integrated into a city app. An additional position in the town hall is planned.