CitizenLab is a digital democracy platform that facilitates community participation and co-creation. Participants can post ideas, contribute to discussion, or choose to vote and prioritize community projects. Whether it’s through a poll, a participatory budget, or idea collection, the CitizenLab platform offers multiple ways to make your community participate, and manage their inputs effectively.
If you'd like to test out the functionalities before setting up your own instance, feel free to take a look at our demo video or explore the demo platform, with all open-source functionalities enabled. Admin credentials are shown in the sign-up flow, if you'd like to get access to the back-office.
CitizenLab adopts a so-called open-core model, which means that there are two product editions available:
- CitizenLab Free Edition, including all core functionalities described under Essential, freely available under the AGPLv3 license. This edition is designed for small organisations running their next engagement project.
- CitizenLab Commercial Edition, including extra features described under Standard/Premium, available by the paid commercial license. This edition is your best option if you plan to run many engagement projects, in order to have access to more back-office functionalities and manage your platform efficiently.
The code repository is organised and configured to get you started on the Free Edition of the CitizenLab software. To use the Commercial Edition or get professional support, consider becoming a CitizenLab client.
Check out the Development Portal to get started:
For more information about CitizenLab, consult our website.
We welcome contributions through GitHub pull request, discussions or issues. In order to get your Pull Request merged, we require you to sign our Contributor License Agreement.
You can also contribute translations. The platform is currently available in +10 languages.
Source code in this repository is covered by
(i) a dual license under the open-source "GNU Affero General Public License v3" and the commercial "CitizenLab Commercial License v1" or
(ii) solely under the "CitizenLab Commercial License v1", in each case, as noted in the applicable header.
The default throughout the repository is a dual license under the "GNU Affero General Public License v3" and the "CitizenLab Commercial License v1", unless the header specifies another license. Code that is licensed solely under the "CitizenLab Commercial License v1" is found only in a ‘/commercial’ parent folder (e.g. in ‘back/engines/commercial’ or ’front/app/modules/commercial’).