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My e-Dem Forum20. October 2008 – 09:49 by Rolf Luehrs |
The 9th World e-Democracy Forum took place on Thursday and Friday last week in Issy-les Moulineaux (Paris) – and was worth attending.
It is an open secret that the quality of conferences depends not only on the official programme, or maybe not even in the first place, but on the people you meet, side talks and social events like lunch & dinner 
. In this regard the quality of the conference was excellent, at least for me. I met people some of whom I am virtually connected with but never met before personally like Simon Smith (Univerity of Leeds) or Catherine Howe (public-i). I also had the opportunity to talk to some “very senior” people who I asked to join PEP-NET’s advisory board which we are about to start. And of course I met people who I know quite well or work together with, like Francesco Molinari or Daniel van Lerberghe.
Lots of people have been introduced among each other and for me it looked very much like the so far small eParticipation community is growing and becomes much better interconnected. This is remarkable since lots of the “usual suspects” attended the Future of Democracy conference hosted by the Council of Europe in Madrid (I am sure Bengt will write somthing about it, when he is back from the Quality Conference in Paris) . Another good thing was that both, audience and speakers came from different domains like research, economy, NGOs, politics and public administrations. Read the rest of this entry »
