Democracy Technologies: Tell us about Bpart.
Bert Hendrickx: Bpart is a participation platform that enables organisations and governments to run stakeholder and citizen participation processes. We work together with a range of partners, including consultants for participation, communication, stakeholder management and digital democracy. Most of our clients are governments or NGOs. Last year, over 70 organisations managed more than 600 projects on our platform.
One of the earliest adopters was the City of Antwerp, who are still a customer today. They use Bpart for their participatory budget – one of the biggest of its kind, allowing citizens to spend €1.4 million a year. They’re a pioneer in terms of participatory budgeting in general. They really put it on the map in Belgium, and in Europe.
DT: What are some other examples of cities you work with?
Hendrickx: The city of Eeklo is another early client, and an interesting contrast to Antwerp. These days, they also have a participatory budget. But initially, they engaged citizens to rename streets, or to collect ideas for their area, where to place benches, and things like that. That was very interesting for us, because with Antwerp, we had a client who ran the same process every year, while gradually refining it and developing a more advanced approach to participatory budgeting. And on the other hand, we had a city that used Bpart for a broader range of smaller projects.
Another long-term cooperation we have is with different governments in the region of Brussels. For example, we worked with the city for five years on our participation platform, and co-developed the budget.brussels project with the region. This means running multilingual projects where citizens can take part in the same process in either Dutch or French. This has allowed us to build multilingual functionality into the core of our platform. We have used this in Switzerland too, and for wider pan-European projects.
DT: Bpart also works with open government data – for example on the project “Je Gemeente Telt,” or “Your Community Counts.” Tell us about the project.
Hendrickx: There’s a discussion that often comes up when you have a few beers at a bar, and someone says: “What’s happening with my tax money?” This was the question that triggered our first budget project, Je Gemeente Telt. It’s a topic where there’s a lot of discussion – people saying we’re spending too much, or too little. But it is usually based on gut feeling, not the hard data.
Je Gemeente Telt is a project of Bpart, Tree Company and De Wakkere Burger, with support of the Flemish government. When we started developing it in 2017, cities in Flanders were already sharing their budget data, it was a legal obligation. But as a citizen, you faced a lot of barriers to access it. At the very least, you had to be able to work with Excel and pivot tables to really make sense of the data. This is not accessible for the many, and that just did not feel right to us.
DT: What was your solution?
Hendrickx: We took the local financial data shared via the Flemish government and presented it in an accessible visual format. We started in 2017 with a few partner cities, but we now publish the budgets of all cities in Flanders, the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. That’s around 300 cities, towns and municipalities.
Wherever you live in Flanders, you can visit our platform, type the name of your city, and see how your local money is being spent. The data is presented in a clear visual form and labelled in easy-to-understand language. You can also compare your municipality with similar cities or towns, to get a better sense of what your local government focuses on.
The first rung of the participation ladder is information. It all starts with making sure that people are informed. Making your financial data available and transparent, for example, is the basis for a good discussion. There’s a lot of research that shows that citizens who are informed feel more involved with local government. Especially around elections, politicians say a lot of things and make a lot of promises. But in the end, it comes down to where they are spending the money. That’s how you see what your government is really doing for you.
DT: How have the cities responded to seeing their data on your platform?
Hendrickx: We did have some surprised reactions from the cities. We even had some angry phone calls: “Why is all our data on your site? Why are you making it public? You have to take it down!” But of course, it’s not us making the data public, it was already publicly available. We just make it accessible, that’s a big difference. But I can imagine that if you didn’t know it was already out in the open, you would be kind of shocked.
But the majority of reactions have been very positive. Some city workers told us that they are using our platform instead of their internal tools because it is more comprehensive. People without financial expertise were grateful, because they could more easily understand what was being done.
It also triggered a response from governments who did not put in that much effort into reporting their financial data accurately. It’s the “garbage in, garbage out” principle. All we do is to visualise the data published by the governments themselves. But some of them label 35% of their budget as “general costs” or “other”. Some people within governments questioned this, but we could only tell them: you are not labelling your data properly.
DT: Who else uses the platform?
Hendrickx: The media are a major user. We got a lot of coverage, especially around the launch. We also had a media partner who was very positive about the platform and really pushed it. There was a huge peak when we launched, with a lot of articles in newspapers. Otherwise, we’ve noticed that users tend to be organisations like NGOs or interest groups, who use our platform to analyse spending on particular topics.
From personal feedback we received, we find there is an initial positive reaction from “normal citizens” as well. People are pleasantly surprised that this kind of data is available. They are curious and look up their city to compare it with others, and click around for a couple of minutes.
That’s a challenge that we have: people look at it once or twice, but it does not trigger a lot of recurrent usage. A lot of people feel that this is nice to have – but we think it’s much more fundamental than that. This kind of transparency is a basic foundation of our democracy.
DT: How was the project funded?
Hendrickx: It was a joint effort. The pilot cities funded part of it, but we also contributed to the costs ourselves, as did some other organisations who were involved in setting it up. It was a bit like crowdsourcing, with 10 or 15 organisations each contributing a little bit. There was not one big customer or client behind it.
Personally, I’m a big believer in the tool, but the reality is that it has little commercial traction. We have pitched it to local governments, but they’re not willing to pay for it on a recurrent basis. The project is budgeted until the current legislative period comes to a close in 2025. But frankly, we don’t know if this project will exist after that.
That hurts a bit, to be honest. But we’re a commercial organisation and we have to take the business perspective into account. It is not especially expensive to run a project like this, but at best it is break-even. However, we were able to develop the software that enables these kinds of budget projects as a reusable module.
DT: Do you see the potential for open data to be used to improve citizen participation projects?
Hendrickx: I already mentioned the City of Antwerp, who are one of our oldest customers. When Je Gemeente Telt came along, they decided to link it to their participatory budget. They saw it as a kind of starting point for getting involved in the participatory budget, to make sure that citizens are informed at the beginning of the process.
A year later, also with Antwerp, our partner Tree Company developed an interactive budget game as a next iteration. It’s a kind of quiz based on the city’s open data, where you have to answer 7 or 8 budget questions. How much do you think it costs to install a bus shelter, how do you think the budget is being spent?… You end up with a test score telling you how close your estimate was to actual spending levels in Antwerp.
Six or seven cities have used a similar application in an effort to increase public knowledge in this area. It is now a standard module in our budget projects, including in the more recent budget.brussels platform. Citizens are sometimes surprised – they say things like “hey guys, a tree costs €7 at a garden centre! Why don’t you plant lots of trees?” Of course, it isn’t just €7. You have to break up and repave the street. You have to pay the staff. It ends up costing more like €1,500 per tree.
In a lot of participatory budgets, this kind of budget game is used to increase the level of awareness on financial spending of the local government. In some cases in Flanders, it’s directly linked with the Je Gemeente Telt project.
DT: What you think needs to change to motivate the greater use of open data for the purposes of democratic transparency?
Hendrickx: The biggest challenge is the need for a change in mindset. On the one hand, the mindset of the governments. They need to answer the question: How transparent do we want to be? At the moment, sharing financial data is a legal requirement. That’s a good thing. But it also means that there is often a lack of intrinsic motivation. It’s just about ticking the box for the minimum effort. This mindset needs to change.
Unfortunately, the same is also true of citizens. Today, we’re more likely to engage with 20 second videos on TikTok which politicians use to push their message rather than spending three minutes on a participation tool. I can definitely understand that people don’t have 15 minutes or more to go downloading tables and exploring them in Excel. But if you lack the motivation to devote one or two minutes to understanding how your money is being spent, that’s definitely a problem.
But I believe we can tackle these challenges. We have to understand that making the data accessible isn’t enough. It’s not a magic formula. It also requires effective communication. For example, we launched a free communication set for Je Gemeente Telt that local governments could use. Following that, we saw a big increase in traffic on the platform.
Communication is always important, for participation projects in general as well. You can set up a good participation process, but if there is no communication about it, there won’t be much participation going on! If we treat communication as a core part of the process, I believe we can improve transparency. And so ultimately improve society, too.
DT: What does Bpart have on the horizon at the moment?
Hendrickx: We have local elections coming up in Belgium later this year. They happen every six years – and a lot has changed since the last elections, especially when it comes to digital participation. There will be changes in policymakers in some cities, it’s the start of a new government cycle, it is exciting. We’ll be looking out to see how citizen engagement and the Bpart platform will play a role in local government strategies. After the election, cities have one year to develop their strategic plans. In Flanders, citizen engagement is actually obligatory – though it is open to interpretation what this means exactly.
We’ve also been working to expand our international impact. We’ve had successful first projects in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, France and elsewhere. And more recently, we were part of the EU GovTech Bootcamp. We have some really cool plans with partners for launches elsewhere in Europe in the near future.
And finally, there’s the Bpart platform itself. There is a lot of exciting software development going on, including integrating new AI capabilities. We have a project in Antwerp at the moment about a public square. There were a few designs, and people could give their input and comments. We’re using our latest AI analysis models for the first time on a real-time project to analyse the inputs. It’s exciting to see the platform evolving.
