2025-03-11 –, bUm Box
Participation and transparency in administration is more important than ever. "unser.muenchen.de" enables citizens to actively participate in decision-making processes. We will talk about how the platform works, the roles of our FOSS service provider, the specialist department, Consul Democracy Foundation and the Munich OSPO.
What can Consul Democracy do?
The platform offers various tools for citizen participation, including:
- Suggestion system: Citizens can submit ideas and proposals for projects.
- Voting: The platform allows users to vote on proposals and thus express their opinions.
- Discussion forums: Citizens can exchange ideas and share opinions on various topics.
- Citizen budgets: The city provides a budget for which citizens can submit ideas, piriorize and vote.
- Collaborative legislation: Citizens can comment on texts
Example: From the design of a leisure area in Würzburg, the renaming of streets (Nazi past) in Bamberg, a citizens' budget of 1 million in Amberg and soon also in Munich, to noise action plans, summer streets and the public drafting of a transparency law for submission to the Bundestag.
International: More than 500,000 citizens registered in Madrid, who in the past decided on a participatory budget of 100 million euros and a traffic-calmed city center. National climate action plans in Colombia and Uruguay.
History
Consul Democracy was developed in Madrid between 2015 and 2019 and has continued to spread since then. Unfortunately, Madrid withdrew from international development in 2019 after a change of government, so that Consul Democracy was displaced or formed decentralized local focal points. With the establishment of the Consul Democracy Foundation, an attempt was made to counteract this development and to create an active community again, as well as to develop a functioning organizational model that works sustainably but is not dependent on a city - and thus on political will.
Dissemination and network
The platform has established itself in over 200 municipalities and forms a far-reaching network.An interactive map shows the locations of the municipalities that use Consul Democracy and makes it possible to track the spread of the platform. https://consuldemocracy.org/about-us/
What is unser.muenchen.de?
Unser.muenchen.de is the City of Munich's consul instance and was launched on the basis of a city council resolution. The organization “Mehr Demokratie” was involved with advice and open source was an important criterion.
Technically, Unser.muenchen.de is operated by the company Demokratie.Today.
The City of Munich purchases a ready-made service, but also sponsors the further development of the core as an ambassador.
Klaus 'klml' Mueller is Head of the OSPO of the City of Munich, which was founded in 2024. Before that, he and his team built the Kubernetes Platform, a world in which FOSS is already standard. Klaus has been a stable FOSS enthusiast since Linux kernel 2.6.0.
Director of the Consul Democracy Foundation