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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.
But also the programme offered a lot of value for me. On the first day I enjoyed chairing the workshop on participatory budgeting (PB) as one of five “Round Table Discussions” held in parallel. Ca. 30 people attended the workshop and discussed the pro and cons of ePB. We managed to finish with the presentations after ca. 45 min so there was room for some interactivity. The presented cases covered the whole range of current PB practice – from rather traditional local projects with little IT support in the UK to ePB projects in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with more than 2 m inhabitants. Ca. 30 participnats attended our workshop and they did not at all look bored.
On the second day I attended the workshop eParticipation @ the heart of Europe, which has been organised by the Momentum project and was chaired by Daniel van Lerberghe. This workshop was packed with interesting presentations. I liked especially the case of the city of Trikalla (Greece) which has been introduced by Vassilis Goulandris. Funded by the Politeia Programme of the Ministry of Interior and the Region of Thessalythe a fully fledged e-Democracy platform and methodology has been developed (eDialogos), covering information, deliberation and decision. The approach remind me on our own called DEMOS and it turned out that we made a lot of similar experiences, e.g. that eParticipation projects need to be championed on a high political level or that marketing is a crucial success factor. However, the most important question still is how to integrate eParticipation with representative democracy and how outcomes should influence political decisions.
Finally, also the plenary discussion with lots of high level representatives from politics and economy were quite interesting. However, sometimes they suffered from a lack of interactivity between speakers and audience. Regarding the considerable expertise among the attendees I was sometimes wondering if it was not much more valuable and interesting for the panellists to have more time to listen to there audience or even to attend some of the workshops. Maybe next year?
Tags: 9th world e-democracy forum, eParticipation, inenglish
3 Responses to “My e-Dem Forum”
By Simon Smith on Oct 21, 2008
I also enjoyed the event, though I agree with you, Rolf, that the plenary sessions were rather formal, with little time for questions. It’s also a pity that all the workshops were crammed into two one-and-a-half your slots on each morning. I would have liked to attend more of them!
The session on eParticipatory budget was certainly a highlight. I chatted afterwards to Dan Jellinek of Headstar (one of those people I knew only virtually before Issy-les-Moulineaux), and we wondered why the UK pilots presented by Ruth Jackson from the Participatory Budgeting Unit are so far taking place only at neighbourhood scale, in contrast to the city-wide experiments in Germany, Spain and Italy. Does this betray a lack of commitment from UK government to participatory democracy? My own view is that starting at a very small scale is not a bad approach, particularly in a country like the UK with a very centralised public administration, but it clearly needs to feed into city-wide decision-making processes at some stage, and maybe this is where eParticipation tools will prove useful. Which actually sounds a lot like the Brazilian approach, as described to us by Tiago Peixoto.
By Rolf Luehrs on Nov 16, 2008
Update: Check Dan Jellinek’s report about the PEP-NET workshop on participatory budgeting:
https://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=170