PEP-NET & Us: A Practitioner’s View 2. June 2008 – 21:36 by Francesco Molinari

Here we summarise some results of the brainstorming session held during the Kick-Off meeting among representatives of NGOs and Public Administrations.

The mixed nature of participants in the consortium was seen as a big value for the exchange of experiences, viewpoints and collaboration opportunities.

A strong expectation from participant municipalities was to become more effective in dissemination and awareness raising on eParticipation related issues at national level. Being able to show up a “critical mass” of European eParticipation initiatives may be very beneficial in that respect.

A requirement was expressed to increase the external links of PEP-NET with similar communities outside the EU (if they exist).

“eParticipation still happens by accident at our times” (e.g. because certain people are in charge at the “right” moment of time) while it should be the result of a purposeful and deliberate process of improvement within Public Administration(s). A related reason for that may be the lack of training in public officials and politicians, who are scared of the undesired consequences of Participation and eParticipation. This is as important as training of citizens and communities who have to enter into a deliberative process.

“eGovernment itself must assume a new meaning – the one of eParticipation”. Currently it is more eAdministration than anything else. The new opportunity coming from ICTs is to let more people (than a few sitting in a same physical room) to have their say, maybe also to complain with public authorities – though this is not the goal of eParticipation in itself.

Participation must emerge as a tool for policy making. More (or less) participation will reinforce (or weaken) eParticipation. It’s a circle, either virtuous or vicious!

Posted in Visions | 1 Comment »

PEP-NET kicked off 26. May 2008 – 14:38 by Rolf Luehrs

On Wednesday and Thursday last week the PEP-NET partners came together at TuTech’s premises to start the project. Although some of the partners knew each other already, it was the first time that the entire project consortium met. It became obvious during the two day workshop that the consortium is remarkable in at least three regards:

1. the high number of well experienced and well known partners
2. the heterogeneity of the consortium comprising public administrations, solution providers, researchers and citizen organisations
3. the distribution of the members all over Europe

In the course of the workshop the different partner introduced their organisations and agreed on the activities for the next six months. High priority has this weblog which we will try to develop to one of the visible resources for information about eParticipation in Europe.

It is planned to publish at least one new article/ posting on each working day. The readers of our blog can expect information on eParticipation related events, the description of interesting cases, reports about eParticipation strategies and general discussions about the current state of eDemocracy and eParticipation in the different countries of the European Union. However, we all agreed that a weblog will only considered to be successful if readers comment on the postings. So please feel cordially invited to discuss with us the various issues of eParticipation in Europe.

On the first day of the meeting the consortium has further more split into three different groups to discuss about the expectations, visions and benefits with respect to the PEP-NET project. The result of this exercise was a clear picture on how PEP-NET can serve the interests of its different stakeholder groups and what roles the members are willing to play in order to help PEP-NET taking off. The concrete results will be introduced in separate articles soon.

Finally we discussed also how interested organisations or individuals could join our network and whether PEP-NET should be transformed into a formal organisation. While this discussion will be continued during the next weeks, we encourage all interested parties to apply for membership (info@pep-net.eu). We will contact all applicants and specify the exact terms a.s.a.p.

More to follow soon,

Rolf Lührs

(Coordinator)

P.S.

I have attached some pictures from our kick-off meeting.

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