Organization: Vouliwatch

Country: Greece

Government Level: National

Overview: Vouliwatch is a digital platform that engages Greek citizens with legislative politics and grants them with the opportunity to communicate, evaluate and hold elected representatives in the Greek and the European Parliament (MPs & MEPs) accountable.

Background: Vouliwatch was set up in March 2014. It is an independent, non for profit organisation aiming to promote public dialogue, knowledge, political participation and accountability between citizens and politicians.

The mission of the project is to encourage Greek citizens to engage in politics, as well as to increase accountability and transparency in the Greek political system. To achieve this, the Vouliwatch team will be cooperating with politicians and civil society in order to promote a culture of dialogue and understanding.

Vouliwatch incubates and cultivates a synergistic democratic culture that inspires institutional and technological innovation. Therefore, we are looking for new ideas, concepts and human networks to disseminate and improve our project.

Implementation: Vouliwatch offers the following tools to citizens:

• Ask your MP/MEP: In a moderated platform, citizens can publicly ask questions and receive public replies by MP’s and MEP’s. To prevent misuse of the platform, all citizen questions and politicians’ answers are crosschecked according to a published code of conduct that is aligned with the principles of open government ethics.

• Votewatch: This application allows citizens to keep track of the parliamentary activities and electoral behaviour of each MP. It provides comprehensive and concise information on legislation being discussed in the parliament while providing background material and relevant infographics.

• Share ideas, experiences and make proposals: Citizens can publicize their experiences, ideas or proposals either at the national or local level. The community of users can comment and rate them. A Google map application depicts all submitted data with the option of filtering based on different criteria (location, subject categories such as e.g. education, tourism, etc.). Every month all submitted data is summarized in a report and sent to all MPs and MEPs by our team, as food for thought and action. In case relevant parliamentary action is taken by MP’s/MEP’s due to a citizen request or a public claim, Vouliwatch publishes and promotes reactions.

• Issue of the month: Every month, our editing team will be choosing a hot political issue. The issue will be debated online and offline, leading to lively political debates or the organization of issue-oriented political labs.

• The Observatory: The Observatory is Vouliwatch’s own blog which provides website users with first hand information on legislation and relevant developments as well as the latest stories from inside the parliament. The blog is updated on a daily basis by a colleague who is based in the parliament and has a background in journalism.

Achievements: In the course of the first three months of our online presence we’ve enjoyed a great deal of support and interest both from citizens and the media. On a monthly basis we receive on average more than 160 questions directed to MPs while the number of registered users on our website is constantly growing. Additionally, more than 10,000 unique visitors visit our platform on a monthly basis.

An important achievement was the successful organisation of an open political discussion/debate based on our “Issue of the month” application. The topic was about Democracy & the EU and we had invited MEP candidates from 6 different political parties who had the chance to present their position as well as being challenged and questioned by the audience. This was our first attempt at transferring an online discussion to a live setting with the presence and active participation of politicians. We are proud to say that it was a great success and all involved parties, both speakers and audience were really pleased with the final outcome.

Critical Issues: Our main challenge at the moment is winning the hearts and minds of Members of Parliament too so as to increase their response rate. About a month prior to the launch of our platform we organized a dedicated event whereby we invited all Members of parliament. The aim of this was to introduce them to our initiative, the technical aspects of our website and start establishing a relationship of trust. Out of a total of 300 MPs, 50 of them joined the event which, given the prevailing political culture in Greece, was an encouraging number. In addition to this, in order to encourage MPs to engage with our website, we have added a counter on each MP’s profile which shows the total number of questions received vs the ones answered. Another idea we recently implemented was to add on the landing page of our website a “top 5” list where the names of the most active MPs are displayed. Finally, we regularly make follow up calls to their offices pressing them to answer their questions.

On a more practical level, given that Vouliwatch is a non for profit organisation, we are currently working to secure its financial sustainability and its continued operation in the long run. We will soon be launching our first crowdfunding campaign while we just recently uploaded a donation page on our website.

Contact: Stefanos Loukopoulos ([email protected]). Vouliwatch is also on Twitter. 

Note: This post is part twelve in a series of case studies on tools PMOs have used that can be replicated or serve as models for organizations in different contexts. To see all of the case studies, click here. To contribute a case study on a project that your organization has created, please fill out the template or email Greg Brown at [email protected].