Ideas for Bristol

What is it?

Ideas for Bristol from Bristol City Council working with in partnership with Adaptive Labs, was a crowd sourcing website that was developed to engage and involve the city's residents in the redevelopment of the city centre. The web-based platform gave local residents the opportunity to contribute their own ideas on how they wanted to shape the city and refine these with other people.

Through the site people could put forward ideas, comment on and rate ideas put forward by other people; tag contributions, map their ideas, share photos and videos, and push content to their wider social networks through Facebook and Twitter. The ideas platform helped widen involvement in the redevelopment of the city centre by providing residents with an accessible and useable site that they had control over. Unfortunately the Ideas for Bristol website is no longer available.

How the idea developed

Bristol City Council had previously used collaborative online tools to involve local residents in activities such as surveys, discussion forums, webcasting, blogging and participatory budgeting. However the Council wanted to go further and test crowd sourced approaches as a way of uncovering new ideas and different solutions to the problems facing the city. They also wanted to test online participatory methods to help them engage citizens earlier in their decision making processes, facilitate conversations between residents and understand how online contributions compared to those made offline.

Ideas for Bristol grew out of a prototype Adaptive Lab had developed with Transport for London. It was designed to ensure users could participate, make suggestions and contribute ideas in a variety of ways and people were encouraged to vote and comment on ideas. The consultation was open for a month during which time the site received 3,654 unique visits, 377 users registered on the site, 128 ideas were submitted and 955 votes were cast.

The project received £11,500 through Nesta's Reboot Britain programme to develop a working prototype of the Ideas for Bristol that was used alongside a wide range of community events as part of the wider planning consultation process.

Latest news (as at 20 August 2012) 

Although the Ideas for Bristol website is no longer available, Bristol City Council remains committed to online engagement and developing crowd sourced approaches. Their e-democracy programme has been bought together through the Ask Bristol website.

Here the council continues to have public conversations about the important issues facing the city using a range of digital tools including e-petitioning, webcasting, online discussions, blogging and an online consultation finder.

Want to know more?

Philip Higgins, Bristol City Council - Philip.higgins@bristol.gov.uk