Your Priorities Features Overview
Your Priorities is a cloud-based online idea generation, deliberation & decision-making platform connecting governments and citizens, evolving since 2008 in thousands of projects, connecting millions of citizens to governments.
Many believe technology has undermined our faith in debate online; instead, our work shows open-source nonprofit innovations in technology restoring trust in democratic deliberation and institutions.
Effective online idea generation
To solve complex problems on all levels facing societies, Your Priorities enables groups of any size, public or private, to come together to find great potential solutions. These solutions are then subjected to a balanced process of deliberation, allowing users to increase trust and harvest the power of the crowd.
Constructive deliberation solution
Citizens add points for or points against each idea. They can then vote the debate points up or down, but they can’t comment directly on them – they will have to write standalone counterpoints. This design makes trolling almost impossible, defangs and downplays any personal arguments between participants.
Automated content management
While our deliberation solution minimizes toxicity to a low level, we also have AI that scans all incoming content for toxicity sentiment. Content management is automated as much as possible. If something toxic makes it onto the platform, community administrators get a notification right away.
Flexible user inputs
Do you need one paragraph or advanced surveys? You can configure Your Priorities for the simplest or the most complex inputs from citizens. You can use simple surveys as a part of idea generation or complete surveys with features like skip questions & rich text. Organize inputs through communities, groups, and categories.
Flexible authentication
To support different engagement models Your Priorities supports government-issued electronic IDs, email & password, Facebook Login, one-time login & anonymous login. Custom registration surveys can be created per community/project. Users have full control over their own data, can delete or anonymize data at any point.
Flexible rating systems
The platform routinely uses hearts, arrows, hats & thumbs for vote up and/or down functionality. Or, you can use custom Emoji ratings, wherein each post can have up to 4 different types of symbols corresponding to different criteria for ratings/evaluations.
Images, videos, audios & locations
Users can submit text, video, and audio content and then upload images with their ideas as evidence, expression, or explanation. Users can provide a location on a map, and audio and video content run through Google Speech-To-Text AI algorithms, providing text transcripts. Upload videos to headers of communities and groups.
Rich Artificial Intelligence features
We design AI to empower citizens democratically. Tightly integrated Google machine translation enables citizens that speak different languages to come together. AI recommendation engine shows users ideas that most interest them first while they swipe through hundreds or thousands of ideas.
Data export & API
Your Priorities features easy export of ideas, points/comments & users to XLS (Excel) and DOCX (Word). Administrators also have access to all data through an API, using API Keys, to connect Your Priorities directly and automatically into various government information systems.
GPT-4 AI Assistant
The GPT-4 module for Your Priorities allows projects that choose to integrate it to harness the capabilities of GPT-4. By combining project data from Your Priorities with GPT-4, this feature aids citizens in navigating and understanding extensive projects, and assists governments in searching and summarizing data.
Land Use Module
The Land Use Module is a 3D “game” crafted in partnership with the University of Iceland and the national government, leveraging the Your Priorities SDK. While initially designed for land use consultations in three of Iceland’s most expansive municipalities, it is adaptable for use anywhere on Earth.
Policy Synth Integration
Using Your Priorities with over 30 GPT-4 agent types, and advanced genetic algorithms, Policy Synth represents a distinctive effort to intertwine human insights with artificial intelligence in addressing complex policy dilemmas.
Usage & Promotion Analytics
Your Priorities has Plausible based usage analytics and promotion tools built into the platform. Optionally, Google Analytics is also supported. Your Priorities features its own extendable data analytics API backend, written in Python. Features include an AI similarities engine to cluster content, WordClouds, process maps, and AI recommendations.
Social media integration
Your Priorities can sometimes be thought of as an extension of mass-market social media, the platforms where governments let citizens know about the opportunities to participate in policy deliberation. Users easily share content on other platforms, with details like uploaded image sizes designed to work well when shared on other social media platforms.
Smart notification system
For regular users and administrators, a range of different types of notifications can be configured to be turned off, be delivered to the browser only, or both browser and emails. Notification types include, for example: All ideas, all comments, comments on my content & all activity, which notifies on every like & dislike.
Bulk Status Updating system
Admins may easily update the status of thousands of ideas with the bulk update system with templates and automated email notifications. This feature enables complex formal participation processes, whereby a large number of users may be updated on what is happening with their ideas at each stage of the process.
Newsfeeds for ideas & communities
These feeds act as activity updates for all levels of deliberation and function as social media feeds where users can post links with comments. This feature enables users to collect outside references to ideas and communities and works similar to a Facebook “wall.”
Progressive Web App
Your Priorities is a mobile-first progressive web app; it works great on big screens but is designed first for mobiles. Each community can be installed as an app on phones’ home screens, and just like native apps, they work when the phone is offline, including for submission of new ideas and debate points.
Highly configurable
Communities & Groups in Your Priorities have hundreds of options for supporting an extensive range of different engagement models. Projects often consist of groups with different configurations for each stage in a formal process. With organizations in 45 countries, since 2008, needing different sets of features for their projects, we’ve added features as configuration options.
Custom help pages
You can set up HTML-based custom help pages for your project that appear under the question mark at the top of the screen at all times. You can configure a help page to show up when a new user registers for your project, useful for GDPR compliance, for example. You can also configure a help page to appear as a popup when a user visits your community for the first time.
Your color themes
Make your community your own by creating your color themes with colors that fit your organization and your main website. Several fonts are available, and we can add custom fonts on request; get in touch with us. The next version of Your Priorities will feature even more theming support, including light and dark mode versions of your theme colors.
Fraud management system
Enable fraud detection, get an email if fraud is detected, and delete all fraudulent content, with just a few clicks. This Fraud Management system detects scripted and other attacks regarding ideas, debate, and endorsements/likes. The feature was developed in collaboration with one of our government partners, in real-time response to an actual sophisticated scripted attack.
Participatory Budgeting
Your Priorities is often used to collect ideas for participatory budgeting projects, and has been used in hundreds of PB projects. Your Priorities integrates tightly with Open Active Voting, our secure and gamified budget voting solution. Your Priorities has many configuration options that help create many different types of PB processes.
Your Priorities Realtime
Our Your Priorities real-time meeting platform allows selected groups of service providers and service users to come together regularly to help improve public services. The platform is integrated with the main Your Priorities platform, where ideas can be collected initially for further processing using the Your Priorities Realtime platform.
Your Priorities Web App SDK
The Your Priorities web app front-end is built using the Web Components HTML standards. This method means that organizations can develop their own web apps with custom functionality that talks to the Your Priorities API, built with NodeJS and easily extended for new functionality. All code is written in Javascript, TypeScript, or Python.
Your Priorities deployment options
The easiest way to start using Your Priorities is the Cloud option, and it’s free if you don’t have the budget; and also offers paid hands-on support from the Citizens Foundation. Or, you can self-host Your Priorities in a cloud of your choice and for most projects; using Docker Compose and LetsEncrypt, a production-ready Your Priorities platform can be set up in a few hours on a new server.
Version 9 is coming soon
Version 9 of Your Priorities will be released in 2023—a new modern, highly accessible user interface with options like dark and high contrast modes. Also, it features a simplified admin app with new functionality like project templates and cloning. It will also include a new promotion feature for sending mass marketing emails to users of Domains, Communities, and/or Groups.