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Next eDemocracy: Upcoming Events and Conferences13. October 2008 – 14:58 by Rolf Luehrs |
eDemocracy and eParticipation are on top of the agenda of different conferences in the next couple of weeks – three of which are taking place at the same time.
More and more conferences are focusing on topics like eDemocracy and eParticipation, that is the good news. Unfortunately the planning of these events is not at all coordinated and it happened that very important events will take place in parallel, competing for both, prominent speakers and interested participants.
As we have already announced, Thursday and Friday next week the 9th World eDemocracy Forum will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Paris). PEP-NET has organised a round table discussion on participatory budgeting. Several high level representatives of politics and public administrations will contribute to the different workshops and plenary session like e.g. André SANTINI, Mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, State Secretary for Civil Service, Eric BESSON, Minister of State for the development of digital economy (France) or Suvi LINDÉN, Minister of Communications (Finland).
Almost at the same time, from Wednesday to Friday next week, the Council of Europe has organised the Forum for the Future of Democracy to be held in Madrid. This event is especially focused on eDemocracy and eInclusion, e.g. ICT for participatory democracy, E-tools in citizen participation at local level and e-participatory Budgets. Speakers are – among others – Ann Macintosh (University of Leeds), William Dutton (Director of the Oxford Internet Institute ) and Herbert Kubicek (Institute for Information Management, Bremen)
Also overlapping with these two events is the Internet Research 9.0 Conference to be held from Oct 15 -18 in Copenhagen (Denmark). There are different tracks dedicated to eParticpation, Civil Society and Politics. Keynote speakers are Mimi Ito, Rich Ling and Stephen Graham.
By the beginning of next week the 5th Quality Conference for Public Administrations in Europe opens. Claim: “The Citizens at the Heart of Public Quality”. The sub-theme 2 is called “Citizen participation as a driving force towards public quality”. Although not exclusively focussed on E-services there are lots of presentations on the intersection of participation and IT.
At the same time (Oct. 21-22) the Global Forum takes place in Athens (Greece). This years theme is called COLLABORATIVE CONVERGENCE, Users Empowerment in the Global Digital Economy. Session 8 is called “Government Challenges. Converging Technologies / E-Democracy and E-Participation. As panellist I have the pleasure to represent PEP-NET in this track.
Last but not least: On November 11 the E-Democracy ‘08 takes place in London. Keynote speakers are Mark Byford, Deputy Director-General, BBC and Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.org. PEP-NET will present the plenary session “E-participation in Europe”
A personal remark: Our Department for Interactive Communications (five full-time employees) at TuTech Innovation GmbH has managed to attend all of these conferences representing at the same time PEP-NET. Although we are looking forward very much to the next weeks, this is at the same time a real challenge for us. And we are probably not the only ones who are suffering from to much conferences in October and November. Dear organisers of eDemocracy and eParticipation events: Could we please try to avoid these kind of overlaps next year? –Much appreciated!
Tags: e-domocracy conferences, inenglish
9 Responses to “Next eDemocracy: Upcoming Events and Conferences”
By Christoforos Korakas on Oct 14, 2008
Exactly!!
This is really a shame …
We are such a small community (compare to other fields of “expertise”) yet we manage to put half of all years events in just a month ! many of which overlapping !
I don’t care who will do this but we need a common forecast planning calendar!!
I tried to do a google calendar compilation of existing events at least but I fear many events are not in there …
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ict4democracy%40gmail.com&src=feil%40tutech.de&src=team%40e-democracy.org&src=qtq4vk4m2st5rjccioac6vmtd8%40group.calendar.google.com&src=njucvpp1tgai9nnrml40jvg7vc%40group.calendar.google.com
By Despina Babbage on Oct 14, 2008
what’s the Department for Interactive Communications?
By Bengt on Oct 14, 2008
Hi Chris,
The PEP-NET calendar tries to up to date also. Perhaps we should merge the two?
https://pep-net.eu/wordpress/?page_id=51
Bengt
By Rolf Luehrs on Oct 14, 2008
@ Despina Babbage
Our department is exclusively concerned with eParticipation, eDemocracy and eGovernment projects. We have developed an eParticipation platform and a methodology for result orientated Internet discourses called DEMOS.
We have realised eParticpation projects in Germany for the cities of Hamburg, Munich, Freiburg and Berlin. We have also some experiences in Europe, e.g. in Austria, Greece, Italy and the UK.The main themes are participatory urban planning (https://pep-net.eu/wordpress/?p=122), participatory budgeting (https://demos-budget.eu/) and family friendly cities.
We are (or have been) also involved in different projects partly financed by the EU like DEMOS, LexiPation, TELL-ME and PEP-NET. I will send you some more information via eMail,
Bests,
Rolf
By Dan Jellinek on Oct 20, 2008
As one of the organisers of one of these events, I heartily endorse your sentiments Rolf.
The problem is, it is hard to shift the date of an annual event by too much as it alters the planning process too much.
We could make our event slightly earlier or later to suit the e-democracy community – perhaps a little later, to the end of November next year, might help. Happy to do that – then if the organisers of the Issy and Krems events could shift theirs a little earlier there would be much more separation.
cheers,
dan
By Simon Smith on Oct 21, 2008
I believe the e-dem 09 conference (in Vienna this time, not Krems) will be a bit earlier: 7-8 September, so perhaps next year there will be less of a clash?
By Fraser on Oct 23, 2008
I vote for a merge, eParticipation week?
By Noella Edelmann on Oct 30, 2008
Simon is right, the Austrian eDem09 is earlier. A combined event / week is an interesting idea worth discussing.
Noella
By Ivan Mise on Oct 30, 2008
No more politics please!