The website is open for everyone to view and participate without registration. However unregistered users can not cooperate with the administration about ideas or projects going forward as they do not leave contact information. Better Reykjavík enables the city of Reykjavík to have a direct dialogue and practice participatory democracy.
Users participate by presenting their own ideas, viewing the ideas of others and/or giving feedback by supporting or opposing them. Better Reykjavík enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritize ideas to improve their city. Better Reykjavík also gives the voters a direct influence on decision making.
Within the Better Reykjavík platform different projects are operated, the biggest being My district which is Reykjavík city´s participatory budgeting project and has been operated since 2012 with over 18m EUR having been allocated directly by citizens to 787 projects, which have been executed throughout the city.
Crowdsourcing ideas
In 2017 the City decided to collect ideas from the citizens to co-create the City’s education policy and used Better Reykjavík for it. This was the first time that actual policy of any government within Iceland was crowdsourced. The process was concluded successfully in 2018 when the education policy was published.
A similar process is now ongoing, where the city is formulating its first democracy policy and asking the citizens to participate by submitting their ideas on improved processes and/or prioritizing democracy objectives.