The House of Culture of El Rosario, inaugurated last year in La Esperanza, today hosted the launch of the citizen participation portal of the El Rosario City Council, created through the most powerful digital tool on the market and personalized for the Rosario municipality by the Redlines company that runs the prestigious analyst César Calderón. The mayor of El Rosario, Scholastic Gil, was in charge of pulling the Esperance blanket under which the portal https://participa.ay Ayuntamientoelrosario.org/ was presented with the motto ’18 .318 ideas for Improvement ‘, one for each inhabitant of El Rosario.
During the presentation of this “powerful and complete tool”, in the words of the president of Rosario, the Canary Islands Transparency Commissioner, Daniel Cerdán; the Councilor for Citizen Participation, Jennifer Torres, and César Calderón, who stated that since 2008, with Barak Obama’s policies in the United States, there has been a before and after in transparency and citizen participation, but clarified that “it is not enough to have a good digital tool, because people participate only in what they know and when communication reaches them, they have to invest so that citizens register in a massive way ”, he explained.
In addition, the authorities included the presence of the first deputy mayor, Sara Cabello, the general director of Institutional Relations of the Vice Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands, Carmen Nieves Gaspar Rivero; the general director of Transparency and Citizen Participation of the regional Executive, Marta Saavedra; the president of the Canarian Federation of Municipalities (Fecam) and mayor of Candelaria, María Concepción Brito; and Ezequiel Domínguez, vice president of the Commission for New Technologies, Electronic Administration, Transparency and Participation of Fecam and mayor of San Juan de la Rambla, along with the rest of the local government.
The first mayor of El Rosario stated that “now is the time to give back to the citizens the trust they have placed in this Government. You, the neighbors of El Rosario have, from now on, in your hands the tool to debate and participate. In short, to be part of the municipal government ”, he stressed.
For his part, the Transparency Commissioner, Daniel Cerdán, described the new participation portal as a “cutting-edge and innovative advance”. “The City Council of El Rosario has opened a path of open government that democratizes the institution and I hope it will be followed by the rest of the local Corporations of the Canary Islands”, while the Councilor for Citizen Participation, Jennifer Torres, recalled that “we were one of the first municipalities in the Canary Islands to fully approve the Citizen Participation Regulation ”, a regulation that was unanimously approved in 2019.
At https://participa.ay Ayuntamientoelrosario.org, which is already operational, the citizens of El Rosario can become part of their government, contributing their ideas, debating and voting on the initiatives of both the municipal government and their neighbors over 16 years of age. .
Developed through an innovative free software platform, the website has been fully customized for El Rosario, where even the photographs that make up the design of the website are of real neighbors of the Municipality.
The City Council of El Rosario will use, to articulate its citizen participation, the same free software that cities such as Madrid, Paris, New York or Buenos Aires already use, a platform that has received the UN award for public service.
Through this platform, the citizens of El Rosario will be able to discuss the life of the Municipality in a reliable and safe environment, propose ideas to the city council, vote for them and even participate in the preparation of municipal budgets, becoming the municipal government themselves.
In this way, the El Rosario government team fulfills its objective of articulating citizen participation, and it does so by resorting to the best international and national practices, building a solid, simple, reliable participatory ecosystem, accessible from various platforms and that also places to the municipality at the head of the best world practices in this matter.
You can open “Debates” on any topic and give your opinion, without being linked to any subsequent action. “Proposals” can also be created with the aim of reaching the necessary support for them to be voted on by the popular vote. In this process, comments can be made with which to improve it, until the necessary support is achieved. If they are successful, the proposal is raised to “Voting” and all users receive an email advising of the deadline to vote for and against. You can also actively participate in voting processes opened by the municipal government team itself, or in participatory budgets.
The Rosario Consistory will also launch various training courses for officials, civil society and citizens of the Municipality to learn how to manage the platform.
