Digital civic participation covers three different things that are constantly confused: reporting a broken streetlight, proposing a policy, and deciding how public money is spent. They need different platforms, produce different evidence, and fail in different ways.
The atlas holds more than 40 documented entries across more than 30 cities in over 20 countries, from Amsterdam's 2009 network to strategies adopted in 2025. This guide sorts them, and connects to the participatory budgeting definition.
| Genre | Examples | What it is good at |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting — issues in public space | Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Singapore | High volume, measurable, operationally useful from day one |
| Deliberation — proposals and debate | Barcelona, Madrid, Seoul, Reykjavik | Agenda-setting — if the administration commits to answering |
| Allocation — participatory budgeting | Paris, Tallinn, Gelsenkirchen | Real stakes, visible results, the strongest engagement driver |
Reporting platforms carry by far the highest traffic. FixMyStreet Brussels grew from 7,000 reports in its 2013 launch year to a record 208,000 in 2025 across 34 partner organisations. That is participation of a kind — but it is service demand, not democratic input, and treating one as evidence of the other is the most common misreading in this field.
Two of the best-documented entries in the atlas point the same way, and both come from cities generally counted as successes.
An academic analysis of FixMyStreet Brussels' early reports found participation skewed toward wealthier, less ethnically diverse neighbourhoods — meaning a heat map of citizen reports is partly a map of who feels entitled to report. Paris' participatory budget records the same caution from the other direction: its 2024 edition drew a record 142,938 voters, and the entry states plainly that this is a small share of roughly two million residents, so turnout should not be read as broad representativeness.
Neither finding argues against the platforms. Both argue against the metric. A city that reports participation as a raw count is measuring reach, not legitimacy — and the correction (targeted outreach, offline channels, quotas for under-represented districts) costs more than the software does.
The most striking pattern here is export. Barcelona built Decidim as open source in 2016; it reached 400+ active instances in over 20 countries, used by Mexico City, Helsinki, New York and France's National Assembly. Madrid's CONSUL engine was reused by 250+ institutions and spawned its own foundation. Two municipal IT departments became global infrastructure suppliers.
And yet Madrid's own platform is the field's clearest cautionary tale. After the 2019 change of administration, Decide Madrid was pared back, approved proposals were discarded and budgets halved — an outcome graded scaled-back in the atlas, on peer-reviewed evidence. The code was never the fragile part. The political commitment was.
Not every closure is a failure. Montevideo's Por mi Barrio was retired in 2022 by the civic-tech NGO that built it, once the city's own digital systems could reproduce its functions — succeeding into obsolescence. Vienna's Kultur-Token, a behavioural pilot rewarding low-carbon travel with cultural vouchers, ran three phases with about 1,000 then 2,000 testers and was formally completed in 2024 with no citywide rollout. Both entries say so rather than leaving the projects listed as live — which is how a large share of participation platforms are described elsewhere long after they stopped.
Curiously, the most rigorous result in this field is not from a deliberation platform at all. Beijing's carbon-inclusive travel incentive was evaluated in a peer-reviewed quasi-experiment: among participants, daily subway trips rose 33.5% and car trips fell 14.1%. Rewarding a specific behaviour turns out to be far easier to measure than consulting on a plan — which is worth knowing before a city promises that its consultation will demonstrate impact.
The practical takeaway: the platforms in this field mostly work. What fails is the commitment behind them — and what misleads is counting participants instead of asking which ones are missing. Put money on the table, publish who voted and who did not, and adopt software someone else already maintains.
Four cities put proposals and budgets online, three of them on software another city wrote. The interesting part is not the launch — it is what the same city's own data says a few years later.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | Where it stands now |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget Participatif — Citywide Participatory BudgetingParis, 🇫🇷 | 2014 | Live | Succeeded | Official | City government | not public | A decade in and still running at scale, with thousands of projects delivered — and no edition in an election year. |
| Decidim Participation PlatformBarcelona, 🇪🇸 | 2016 | Live | Succeeded | Official | City government | not public | The software outgrew the city that wrote it, running in hundreds of institutions while Barcelona still uses it at home. |
| Decide MadridMadrid, 🇪🇸 | 2015 | Live | Scaled back | Peer-reviewed | City government | not public | The engine was reused worldwide; the platform that produced it was pared back by the administration that inherited it. |
| BA Elige: Buenos Aires's Online Participatory BudgetBuenos Aires, 🇦🇷 | 2017 | Completed | Scaled back | Peer-reviewed | City government | not public | Three editions on Madrid's software, and the city's own dataset records the traffic falling away between them. |