About us

We’re a team of passionate civic tech professionals and expert partners on a mission to to empower as many people as possible to participate in respectful, meaningful discussions. We’re based in Estonia and Indonesia, but are working with partners across the world.

The Citizen OS Foundation

We are a civic tech non-profit organisation, with headquarters based in Tallinn, Estonia, and a second office in Jakarta, Indonesia, both of which are working on a local level, but also running together many international projects.

Our mission is “To empower as many people as possible to participate in respectful, meaningful discussions in order to collaboratively decide on issues that affect their wellbeing.”

We focus on two things:

  1. Building and maintaining a secure and open-source collaborative decision-making platform for civic initiatives, which is provided free of charge to anyone who wants to use it. The online platform allows for deliberative discussions, collaborative decision-making and voting in situations where it is either impossible or inconvenient for participants to be in the same room, and –
  2. Running participatory e-democracy projects, which together serve as the driving force behind our commitment to creating a society where every voice matters, and collective decisions are shaped by the collective will of the people.

In Estonia, where a national e-ID system is in place, the Citizen OS platform is also used in situations when a large number of people need to digitally sign a single document, such as people’s initiatives, petitions, housing associations agreements and NGO general meetings. Documents signed using the Citizen OS platform are accepted by all levels of government, including the Riigikogu (Estonia’s Parliament) and the national Commercial Register.

We strive to bring decision-making back to the people and their communities, through nurturing e-democracy and developing innovative technologies for higher quality collaborative decision-making.

Visit our Vision and Projects pages to find out more about why and what we do. Also, please see our News page for interviews / updates and check out our social media channels for inspiration.

Some facts:

  • Citizen OS platform went live in September, 2015. Since then, we have gained the trust of many public and private user groups around the world.
  • We take the security of our platform very seriously – read more about this here or view our legal documents.
  • Citizen OS adheres to ethical principles for NGOs, as outlined on the Hea Kodanik (The Good Citizen) website.

Citizen OS was co-founded by:

We are funded by private donations and grants

Project Citizen OS has been funded by the NGO Fund EEA Grants through the Open Estonia Foundation.

How we’re doing

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