Decide Madrid: A Spanish best practice on e-participation

Abstract

This chapter analyses the award-winning e-participation initiative of the city council of Madrid (Spain), Decide Madrid, in order to discover its critical success factors on contextual, organizational and individual levels. The analysis is carried out on the basis of desk research and semi-structured interviews. The results show that the most relevant success factors are the commitment of the city council, the use of individual interviews in the recruitment of the staff in charge of running the platform and the knowledge of senior managers on citizen participation and ICT. However, the lack of transparency and poor functioning of some of the participatory activities negatively affect its performance. The software created for this platform, Consul, has been adopted or is in the process of being implemented in more than 100 institutions in 33 countries. Therefore, the findings of this research could potentially be useful in improving the performance and sustainability of similar e-participation platforms.