participation Archives

Mikko Rask, Titiana Ertiö, Pekka Tuominen & Veronica Ahonen

Final evaluation of the City of Helsinki’s participatory budgeting

Published 11.5.2021

Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation for urban development, whereby citizens propose projects and vote on their implementation. Between 2018–2020, the City of Helsinki piloted a participatory budgeting process known as OmaStadi, with an allocated budget of EUR 4.4 million. This operational model emphasises direct democracy and online democracy as well as co-creation.

We evaluated the OmaStadi project by analysing participant voting data and responses to feedback surveys. We conducted participant observation in events organised throughout the project and interviewed political decision-makers, association and NGO actors as well as City experts. We used the Co-Creation Radar as our evaluation method as it reflects the myriad dimensions of societal values through its twelve evaluation criteria.

Our overall evaluation of the OmaStadi pilot is cautiously positive. Many lessons have already been learned for the second round. However, there is also plenty of room for improvement and development should continue based on the accrued experiences.

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Bokyong Shin & Mikko Rask

Assessment of Online Deliberative Quality: New Indicators Using Network Analysis and Time-Series Analysis

Published 23.1.2021

Online deliberation research has recently developed automated indicators to assess the deliberative quality of much user-generated online data. While most previous studies have developed indicators based on content analysis and network analysis, time-series data and associated methods have been studied less thoroughly. This article contributes to the literature by proposing indicators based on a combination of network analysis and time-series analysis, arguing that it will help monitor how online deliberation evolves. Based on Habermasian deliberative criteria, we develop six throughput indicators and demonstrate their applications in the OmaStadi participatory budgeting project in Helsinki, Finland. The study results show that these indicators consist of intuitive figures and visualizations that will facilitate collective intelligence on ongoing processes and ways to solve problems promptly.

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Mikko Rask, Alisa Puustinen, Harri Raisio

Understanding the Emerging Fourth Sector and Its Governance Implications

Published 15.9.2020

The fourth sector has traditionally been described as encompassing families, households, neighbours, and friends, however, competing definitions have recently begun to emerge. Three different strands can be observed in the fourth-sector literature. The first strand centres on the notion of one-to-one aid. The second strand centres on self-organizing civic activism. The third strand focuses on hybrid organizations. In this paper we will analyse the main commonalities and differences in the understanding of the fourth sector. Our conclusion is that despite differences, there is enough ‘family resemblance’ between the three different streams of fourth-sector discussion to warrant a synthetic reflection of the governance issues related to this novel phenomenon. As a result of that analysis, we distinguish five specific governance issues that are related to 1) the ability of the public sector to work upon shared values, 2) the empowering nature of self-organizing, 3) the need for new operational rules under the ‘sharing economy’, 4) the transitory but structuration-oriented nature of fourth-sector processes and 5) the notion that fourth-sector involvement does not necessarily improve the quality of participation.

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