Informing Citizens via Council Information Systems

Digital information about their city or municipality can enable citizens to improve their living environment through informed decisions and participation. As part of the publication of their data, many municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany have therefore introduced so-called Council Information Systems (CIS) through which the citizens of a municipality can inform themselves about decisions affecting them and the work of their political representatives. However, these systems are often not known by citizens and sometimes challenging to find. The Open Knowledge Foundation's project Politik bei uns (“Politics with us”) offers a promising starting point in improving the accessibility. The data of different Council Information Systems are bundled in a central portal and are thus available to a broader mass of people. This case study evaluates how this system can be further improved so that the portal meets the needs of its addressees - citizens who are not familiar with the work of a council. With the help of standardization to reduce the variation in terms chosen for labeling the different kinds of documents, an increase in accessibility can be achieved. Against this background, we took stock of the current situation concerning the existence and state of such systems in North Rhine-Westphalia and developed a taxonomy that distinguishes the more than 90 different types of documents that can be filtered in the search into a few abstract categories and thus dramatically increases the accessibility of the portal for its users. Ultimately, we were able to reduce the number of terms used in labeling the different kinds of political documents to a minimum of four, thereby severely improving the usability for inexperienced users of Council Information Systems.