Open data from citizen and youth participation projects

Politik zum Anfassen e.V. runs youth democracy simulations that generate thousands of policy ideas. We build a platform to make this data searchable and track real-world implementation.

Data CollectionData ManagementAI Open DataAdministrativeSurvey

Status: Finished
Project Period: March 2024 – November 2024
Outputs: External Article
Partner: Politik zum Anfassen e.V.

We have a passion for democracy and we make people want to participate in democracy: our association sees itself as an event agency for knowledge and positive experiences of democracy. With simulation games, a participation app, hands-on exhibitions and much more, we combine political education with youth participation that is fun. 
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: Civic Data Lab

The Civic Data Lab is a joint initiative of the German Informatics Society, CorrelAid, and the German Caritas Association – funded as a Civic Coding anchor project by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth. The Civic Data Lab supports organized and non-organized actors in civil society to better achieve common-good-oriented goals through the use of data – by collecting, organizing, and structuring their data, analyzing and linking it, reusing it for their target groups, making it available to others, and supplementing it with available data. Data ABOUT people is reused FOR them. BY civil society, FOR civil society. For the common good. By and for EVERYONE. (Source: https://civic-data.de/)
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The work of Politik zum Anfassen e.V. (Politics Up Close) promotes democracy in projects for political education and participation—for example, with the local politics simulation game “Pimp Your Town!” In this game, young people slip into the roles of local politicians and develop proposals for improving their community, which are then ideally carried over into “real” politics. Around 6,500 ideas have been generated so far, which are likely to be of interest not only to local authorities. However, there has been no way to make this data available to others, to make it searchable and usable, or to communicate the status of the actual political implementation of ideas.

The association approached us at the Civic Data Lab with this problem. Together, we set about implementing a solution. A minimum viable product (MVP) is currently available for internal testing. The release is planned for September – we will let you know as soon as you can try out the site. In this article, we would like to show you how we approached the project.