Press releases

• Aachen is an innovative city where citizens are encouraged to get involved in shaping the city's future.
• Solutions must be found for current challenges in the city centre, housing, mobility, digitalization, climate and education.
• This is why the opinion of Aachen's residents is needed, which the city administration would like to obtain in a more representative way in future through the AachenPanel.

"The people of Aachen are very interested in shaping their city and bring a wealth of expertise with them. We now want to make greater use of this potential and offer another participation tool with the AachenPanel - alongside the Citizens' Dialogue and Citizens' Council," explained Lord Mayor Sibylle Keupen. The AachenPanel is a digital platform that opens up representative survey results. In future, the City of the Future and Citizens' Dialogue department would like to post at least one survey every quarter, the results of which will then be specifically evaluated. For example, the evaluations can then show how a certain district or age group thinks about a particular topic.

Everyone's opinion is needed

"The respective departments develop the surveys in close cooperation with the City of the Future and Citizens' Dialogue department. The departments then receive the survey results with anonymized data from the Statistics and Elections Department and can use them to derive possible courses of action. It is also planned to publish the survey results online," said Dr. Simon Himmel, Deputy Head of the City of the Future and Citizens' Dialogue department, explaining the procedure. Creating the largest possible resonance space was always taken into consideration during the conception phase. The embedding of the AachenPanel within the participation platform of the state of NRW ("Beteiligung NRW") ensures accessibility.

The AachenPanel is primarily intended to reach those who are otherwise underrepresented in the political discourse. To achieve this, the city administration is now proactively writing to 20,000 people from the population register and asking them to register. Socially challenged groups are overweighted in order to encourage them to participate. However, the platform is open to anyone who is at least 16 years old and lives in Aachen. The aim is to steadily increase the number of participants over the coming months and to check the representativeness of this group.

This is how registration works

To ensure that only people from Aachen actually take part in the surveys, registration is only possible with an existing BundID. Interested parties should therefore first apply for a BundID if they do not already have one. They can then register for the AachenPanel via the service portal. Finally, citizens register with "Beteiligung NRW" and can then log in to the AachenPanel with their BundID. Registered users will receive an email notification when new surveys become available. If you have any questions about the registration process, you can contact the district management, the district offices or the citizen service.

The first survey is already underway: all Aachen residents are invited to contribute their opinions on the topic of mobility!

Further information and registration:

https://serviceportal.aachen.de/suche/-/vr-bis-detail/dienstleistung/5802007/show