Vision and mission

The UAE government’s ambition is to foster public participation in governance by building a consultative ecosystem where the people are able to share their ideas, thoughts and recommendations with government entities. The entire ecosystem seeks to rest on the founding principles of inclusion, ensuring a deeper involvement of all segments of society equally in charting the UAE’s future. With this, the UAE government also aspires to enhance UAE`s International reputation and stature as a global leader in the area of Digital Public Participation. The Strategy for Digital Participation has been developed in alignment with this ambition.

Vision

A prosperous future designed together

Mission

Create an inclusive ecosystem that empowers the people to participate and innovate in the formulation of government policies and services.

Key objectives

The strategy aims to achieve six key objectives for encouraging digital participation:

1. Craft a goal-oriented policy that enables the digital participation ecosystem
2. Set data-driven processes to enhance effectiveness of all digital participation initiatives
3. Raise public awareness on government policies and upcoming or ongoing projects, increase engagement and incorporate feedback.
4. Ensure every segment of society is included by default
5. Develop the best-in-class platform experience for digital participation
6. Build capacities for continuous innovation and improvement to drive digital participation.

Strategic capabilities

To achieve the above objectives, the UAE Digital Participation Strategy focuses on developing competencies across six broad capability areas. Below are the capability areas that the strategy intends to strengthen:

1- Policies and standards

1. Align strategies and policies with the National Digital Participation Strategy

Update the National Digital Government Strategy to include digital participation and update the National E-Participation Policy to make Digital Participation a strategic objective for government entities and allocate dedicated budget 

2- Process enhancement

1. Build synergies and reduce cost through formation of a high-level national committee 

   Create a shared services committee to handle capabilities such as awareness, marketing and digital inclusion. Involve top management in the high-level steering committee overseeing the execution committee, which works closely with empowered e-participation champions from the entities and are governed by standard governance and practices.

    

2. Enhance digital participation processes and redesign KPIs

   Build a robust framework for the digital participation process supported with guidelines, templates and checklists and redesign the Digital Participation Process KPIs to mandate adherence

    

3. Governance for digital participation tools and enablers

   Update the policy to ensure 3rd party tools and enablers go through the Digital Participation Committee approval process before implementation and use

    

4. Create national participation maturity index

Create a national digital participation maturity index to rank the entities on their efforts in the digital participation space.

3- Multi-channel Engagement

1. Increase public awareness and participation through online and offline initiatives

   Increase awareness of public participation initiatives through a combination of online and offline activities and incentivize the people to participate through monetary and non-monetary benefits

    

2. Enable participation for women and other vulnerable groups

Encourage participation from women and other vulnerable groups through targeted awareness programs, initiatives and making the platform accessible to them

4- Public Agenda Setting

1. Empower public for effective participation

   Enable the people to set agenda of their choice through polls and ideation platforms. Share large government datasets and provide data analysis tools for analysis to the public. Conduct co-design and co-creation exercises like hackathons and competitions

    

2. Encourage and support public to run platform for public participation

Support in setting up public-run platforms for generating ideas, setting up the agenda and

5- Digital Participation Enablers

1. Digital Participation Platform v2.0

Develop a unified platform for all Digital Participation activities in the UAE that can provide tools and resources to the people to effectively contribute, and has capabilities like automated notifications, digital marketing, web analytics, etc. for enabling entities to engage with the public 

6- Organizational Capacity and Innovation

1. Educate and train entities on digital participation value, processes and platforms

   Impart training to entity leaders, e-participation champions and general staff on the values, processes and capabilities to create greater awareness and acceptance  

    

2. Create innovation group

   Create a group for continuous research and innovation around popular practices and initiatives for digital public participation as a part of the National Digital Participation Committee

    

3. Adopt Open Government Partnership (OGP) principles and processes

Adopt Open Government Principles and Processes to drive continuous innovation in the field of Digital Participation and involve the people in engaging ways. This will be as per UAE laws and policies.

Key initiatives

The strategic capabilities will be achieved through the 13 key initiatives as outlined below.