Why

The Your Priorities web app empowers groups of any size to speak with one voice and organise around ideas. The solution can be used to build trust between citizens and governments and enable better decision making by crowdsourcing policy in cooperation between citizens and government.

The Your Priorities web app is simple to use, fun to play with in a meaningful context and it scales well to big and small projects. The web app is optimised to suit use via computers, tablets and smartphones.

Your Priorities participation projects have had over 1.5 million unique visitors since 2008, having been used in Estonia, Australia, Norway, Scotland, USA, UK, Romania, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Iceland and elsewhere.  

How it works

Citizens add ideas onto the platform, which they provide points for and against, which informs debate. The ideas and the argumentation provided by citizens is then up-voted or down-voted by citizens with the most popular ideas and best points for and against visible to everyone.

The interface inspires debate with points for and against placed in different columns. This makes it harder for arguments to go off topic instead encouraging rational debate and positive points, curbing negativity and personal attacks. The trend of the loudest voice becoming dominant is mitigated with minority and majority views having equal weight, helping facilitating consensus.

The output of these projects results in the best ideas and solutions of participants, garnering increased civic knowledge of participants and higher public acceptance and satisfaction levels with use of citizens’ ideas and contributions.

Try

You can start using Your Priorities right now for you participation project. It is free for nonprofit projects and available with a service level agreement for governments and larger organizations.

See our project portfolio for various examples of you can use Your Priorities.

Or visit the Your Priorities participatory social network and try it out for yourself.

Your Priorities is open source on github.

View a short guide on how to setup your own community on Your Priorities.