Comparison of Local Election Parties Offered by Bottroper Electoral-Navi

In the heart of Germany, the city of Bottrop has taken a significant step towards democratic transparency with the launch of the Bottrop Election Navigator. This innovative tool, the brainchild of the Future Bottrop initiative, allows citizens to compare their views with those of the parties running for the city council election based on 30 carefully curated theses.

The theses, developed in collaboration with cognitive and media scientist Lukas Erle from the University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West and students of the 'Cognition, Communication, and Media Psychology' module in the 'Human-Technology Interaction' degree program, were created based on the concerns, questions, and demands of Bottrop's citizens.

Among the theses included in the Election Navigator are proposals to prevent the expansion of the drug/alcohol scene, connect the culinary mile and central city center, move the Christmas market, and provide more facilities in the city center.

The technical realization of the Bottrop Election Navigator was supported by the University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West, with the programming done by master student Enrico Perea Mancilla as a student project.

The interactive table, available for users who want to delve deeper into the positions of the parties, stores explanations for the theses and the answers of the parties. Users can express their agreement, disagreement, or neutrality on these theses.

The Wahl-Navi, as it is affectionately known, went online on Monday at 7 p.m. and had already received 400 hits by the first evening. The contents of the Bottrop Election Navigator were checked for local political responsibility and presented to the parties for answering.

However, the search results do not provide direct information on which parties in Bottrop responded to the 30 theses published in the Wahl-Navigator or how their responses are distributed. Only Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, represented by Felix Banaszak, are mentioned as active in Bottrop around the election time, but no details on their answers to the theses are given.

The Election Navigator is running stably, with the initiators assuring that everyone who works through the theses will get a result. The Wahl-Navi can be accessed at https://www.zukunft-bottrop.de/wahlnavi/.

Initially, there were 163 topics, theses, demands, and questions, which were filtered to ensure that solutions are possible on a local level. The program is also behind the "Our Website-O-Mat" that the local editorial team in Essen started on Sunday.

The Bottrop Election Navigator is a testament to the power of citizen engagement and the potential for technology to bridge the gap between the public and the political sphere. It invites Bottrop's residents to actively participate in the democratic process and make informed decisions based on their values and beliefs.