ConCensus is a new form of public participation in which group of engaged citizens collaboratively develops a proposal for a new policy and presents it to the City Council. Furthermore and even more importantly, the members of the group are officially recognised by the City Council as the overseers of that action’s progress and the completion of its implementation.

Jerusalem is among the very first cities to carry out a full public participation process as foreseen by ConCensus. In Jerusalem the improvement of water use within the Community Urban Gardens has been defined together with the City Council as the initial topic to work on.

The first step in the ConCensus process is the collective development of ideas for policies to be addressed and the joint selection of the best/most urgent ones to be presented to the City Council of Jerusalem in January 2019. The discussion area below is the place where you as participants can share you policy ideas, comment and discuss them and refine them and vote for the top 3 ideas – all in a structured, platform-supported process:

1. First, participants have 2 weeks (until Dec 21 2018) to collect ideas on the platform and to discuss them and give suggestions for improvement.
2. Subsequently, each idea owner has 10 days (until Dec 31 2018) to refine his/her idea and to submit an updated version of their proposal.
3. Then 10 days (until Jan 11 2019) of idea voting (liking) by all members of the ConCensus group takes place.
4. Based on the community voting, the top 3 ideas are being selected for presentation to the City Council of Jerusalem for implementation.
   

For a more in-depth insight into the ConCensus approach, please take a look at the document below called "The future of citizen engagement in cities—The council of citizen engagement in sustainable urban strategies (ConCensus)" which has been published in the Futures journal.
Cover picture by Haravinth Rajan (Creative Commons license).