Citizens Foundation

About us

Citizens Foundation is a non-profit organisation based in Reykjavik, Iceland, since 2008. The Citizens Foundation was founded in the aftermath of the Iceland’s economic and trust collapse in 2008. Since then we’ve developed open source tools and methods to promote online, democratic debate and to increase citizens’ participation in their community in Iceland and worldwide. We help governments setup locally owned and operated digital democratic infrastructure.

Our mission is to bring people together to debate and prioritize innovative ideas to improve their communities. Since 2008, the Citizens Foundation has used Your Priorities to promote online, democratic debate in Iceland and worldwide.

Our main goal is to help citizens get their voices heard and to encourage citizens participation in governance.

Our work
The Citizens Foundation, a global nonprofit based in Iceland, provides affordable, creative, and secure open source solutions using the latest web technology for civic engagement.
Easy to use, mobile adapted, multilingual solutions for citizens to engage their governments or other organisations are our speciality.
Our tools are used daily to generate ideas and solutions for communities as well as to make binding or advisory budget choices on refined ideas during special periods.

Our Services
• Participation consultancy: After 10 years of innovating democracy, we know how to make projects successful with our tools and many achieve double-digit mass participation rates. We offer governments and non-governmental organizations participation consultations ranging from project design & marketing to roll-out of services.
• Hosted electronic democracy solutions: We offer fully hosted services along with service level agreements.
• Participation software development: We do custom software development based on our open source apps to be able t execute any kind of participatory project.
• Your Priorities is a service that provides a website for every country in the world, free of charge. Groups, cities, or countries can also use this service to improve their communities.

Open Participation Solutions & Services
• Policy Crowdsourcing: Build up trust in your community with idea generation, policy crowdsourcing and debate.
• Participatory Budgeting: Budget voting and civic education with Open Active Voting
• Empower Citizens With AI: Empower citizens with Artificial Intelligence with Active Citizen

Robert Bjarnason is the President/CEO of the Citizens Foundation.

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work