Your Idea for the Zugdidi Mayor (GE0085)

Commitment 5: Your idea for the Zugdidi Mayor

The project “Your Idea for the Zugdidi Mayor” implies the creation of an electronic portal, through which the Zugdidi population will communicate with the Town Mayor by proposing a specific idea/initiative. This will facilitate the deepening of cooperation between the local self-government and citizens and raising the civic responsibility. The Town Hall commits to be more accountable to citizens and to respond the entered ideas, even if, due to some restrictions, they are not implementable.

Commitment 5: Your idea to the Zugdidi Mayor
Lead Agency Zugdidi Municipality Town Hall
Other Involved Actors Public Agency Zugdidi Municipality Assembly
Civil Society/ Private Sector/ International organization
Issues to be Addressed The Zugdidi Municipality Town Hall takes an active part in the implementation of many projects directed at enhancing the citizen engagement in the exercise of local self-governance. The Town hall has also set up Subject Councils for the purpose. In spite of this, citizen interest and activity is low, which can be ascribed to different reasons.
Main Objective By way of supporting the citizen initiatives and creating real cases/examples, stimulation of citizen participation in the local government activities and the decision-making process.
OGP Challenge Better management of public resources
OGP Principles Transparency Accountability Civil Participation Technology and Innovation
  
Milestones to Fulfill the Commitment New or ongoing commitment Start date End date
Approval of regulations on the making of an e-portal New June 2018 October, 2018
E-portal making and activation New October 2018 June 2019
Informing population about the e-portal New June 2019 December 2019
Indicator The e-portal has been made; portal familiarization meetings with citizens have been held; 10 proposals have been entered through the e-portal.
Risks and Assumptions The issue is complex and its successful implementation depends on the engagement of the respective donor and civil society.

Commitment 20: Your Idea for Zugdidi Mayor

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan:

“The project ‘Your Idea for the Zugdidi Mayor’ implies the creation of an electronic portal, through which the Zugdidi population will communicate with the Town Mayor by proposing a specific idea/initiative. This will facilitate the deepening of cooperation between the local self-government and citizens and raising the civic responsibility. The Town Hall commits to be more accountable to citizens and to respond the entered ideas, even if, due to some restrictions, they are not implementable"

Milestones: 

1. Approval of regulations on the making of an e-portal
2. E-portal making and activation
3. Informing population about the e-portal

Start Date: June 2018

End Date: December 2019

Editorial note: For the full text of this commitment, please see https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/georgia-action-plan-2018-2019/.

Context and Objectives

Georgia’s previous action plan (2016–2017) included a commitment to introduce an electronic portal for petitions in Zugdidi Municipality. While the new petitions portal was incorporated on the municipality’s new website, the petitions mechanism was not functional by the end of the action plan. [109] Currently, Zugdidi residents are able to submit petitions as hard copies to the Municipal Assembly. This commitment aims to create an electronic portal called Your Idea to the Zugdidi Mayor, which would provide an official mechanism for residents to propose their ideas to the mayor of the municipality.

According to the commitment, the municipality also plans to respond to all citizen proposals, even those that it deems not administratively feasible. The Municipality of Zugdidi will approve the legislative framework for this kind of communication, develop and launch the portal, and promote it to residents. Consequently, this commitment is relevant to the OGP value of civic participation. The e-portal is verifiable, but the milestone to “inform” the public on the new e-portal is not explained in detail.

The portal is expected to provide a new opportunity for citizens to communicate their ideas to the municipal government, but it is unclear how the initiatives will be considered and/or implemented and what will be the selection process. According to the IRM researcher’s focus group discussion participants, the success of the portal greatly depends on how the government considers the petitions from citizens and which decisions it decides to carry out. [110] Therefore, the overall potential impact is minor.

Next steps

To improve engagement, the IRM researcher recommends that the Zugdidi Municipality Town Hall explore ways for offline citizen engagement, particularly in villages where internet penetration is lower.

The commitment text currently lacks general information about how the web portal is supposed to work and what kind of ideas it will support. Accordingly, the IRM researcher advises the government to provide more details about the selection criteria and process, and specifics related to each of the milestones.

The IRM researcher also recommends that Zugdidi Municipality refer to the similar project of Tbilisi City (idea.tbilisi.gov.ge) as a good example to emulate. Many ideas can be generated and incorporated, such as a public voting and a sectoral filtering function.

[109] Open Government Partnership, IRM: Georgia End-of-Term Report 2016–2018, pp. 66–67, https://bit.ly/2U7yxyt

[110] IRM researcher’s focus group discussion with students in Zugdidi, 15 June 2019.

20. Your idea for Zugdidi Mayor

Not Started

By the end of the action plan period, Zugdidi Municipality had not started developing the “Your Idea to the Zugdidi Mayor” portal. According to the municipality’s Public Relations Department representative, [75] Zugdidi Municipality did not consider it necessary to start the project because the Municipal Services Development Agency (MSDA) already planned to introduce a similar portal under a separate project. MSDA launched the new portal idea.municipal.gov.ge in November 2020, where users can choose Zugdidi, and submit their ideas to the municipality.