The City of Helsinki’s new Decisions service is part of an extensive renewal of the City of Helsinki’s main website www.hel.fi. The renewal set out to make the city’s new webpages easier to understand and navigate. The Decisions service continues this effort by making information about the activities of each of the city’s decision-making bodies more transparent. The new service also contains a convenient meeting calendar.
The new webpages help to make the decision-making of the Helsinki City Council, the Helsinki City Board, and various committees, boards and working groups and vocabulary easier to follow. The service also clears up some of the vocabulary associated with municipal decision-making. If concepts such as residents’ initiative, question hour and diary numbers are unfamiliar, visitors to the new webpages will be able find the answers.
“We put together a glossary that explains some of the key decision-making concepts. We also tried to illustrate the stages of the decision-making process with diagrams and explanations of the different steps involved,” said Aleksi Salonen, the City Executive Office communications specialist responsible for the Decisions service digitalisation project.
The City of Helsinki’s decision-making work takes place in Finnish and Swedish, as the city is officially bilingual. You can browse the service’s webpages in English, but most of the decision documents themselves are only available in Finnish. The proceedings of the Helsinki City Council are however also available in Swedish.
The service contains all of the city’s decisions dating back to 2018. Close to 16,400 decisions were made in the year 2022 alone. Time and effort was put into making the new Decision service as easy to use as possible, with versatile search functions and clear organisation.
“You can search for decisions by subject, decision-maker or timeframe. You can also follow the progress of a certain issue as it moves through the decision-making process and see how it is linked to the wider whole. Public hearings and announcements are included, and the service also clarifies the appeal process,” Salonen said.
Decision webpages promote true democracy
The Decisions service is very important for the realisation of democracy, according to Antti Peltonen, Head of the City Executive Office’s Administrative Unit.
“The clearer the Decisions service, the better self-governance and democracy will be realised. Finland’s laws on municipal government, for example, stipulate that people should be notified of decisions in order to practice the municipal right to appeal, and that this notification should be carried out in accordance with the Local Government Act by publishing the minutes on a public information network,” he said.
The Decisions webpages have replaced the City of Helsinki’s former webpages that outlined the decision-making process. It is easy to access the information with mobile devices, as the user interface was designed for the web. Information on documents, meetings, and the members of different decision-making bodies will be updated to the new service automatically via the City of Helsinki’s information system interface.