Brussels Permanent Citizens’ Assembly on Climate
Brussels is now home to the world’s first permanent Citizens' Assembly on Climate. Can permanent climate assemblies like this one help overcome the short term thinking of representative democracy and make our societies stronger and more cohesive?
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Technology at All Stages of the Electoral Process
Elections are the core of the democratic process. Some of the first documented elections took place around 500 BC in Ancient Greece, where male landowners wrote the name of the candidate they most wanted exiled for the next ten years on broken pieces of clay pots. If the threshold of 6000 votes was met, the […]
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Brussels Voice – Can Participatory Democracy Replace the Right to Vote?
One in three people living in Brussels is non-Belgian. This means they cannot vote in regional elections. This year, Commissioner Brussels is working with the regional parliament to set up a citizen panel of international citizens of Brussels. The goal: to give them a voice in how the city where they live is run. Democracy Technologies spoke with project officer, Bryn Watkins, about what they hope to achieve and why it’s complicated
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Can EurHope Involve 1 Million Young People in EU Politics?
EU Public Affairs Manager, Nahr, is upbeat in spite of the polycrises Europe currently faces as it looks towards next year’s European elections. “The good news is that destiny is in our hands – we’re not doomed, there is space for hope and destiny”, he says. Nahr is referring to the EurHope project that launched […]
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Scotland Embraces Digital Democracy at Parliamentary Level
What happens when digital approaches to deliberative democracy are adopted at parliamentary level? The Scottish parliament tells us more.
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FIDE Event: The Deliberative Wave is Here to Stay
Head of Cabinet of the Vice President for Democracy & Demography at the European Commission, Colin Scicluna, put it simply, “We have adopted the deliberative approach”. He acknowledges that their experience with the Conference on the Future of Europe convinced the Commission to “trust in these types of processes” and has helped them realise the […]
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Leading the World in AI Regulation – Is the EU’s AI Act Up to the Challenge?
As the EU’s ambitious Artificial Intelligence Act gets the green light from the European Parliament, we take a closer look at what exactly it involves and reflect on some of the challenges it faces.
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What If Participation Was More Like A Game?
If you’ve recently spent time on Duolingo, claimed airmiles or downloaded an exercise app like Zombies, Run!, you’re familiar with the basic elements of gamification. Commercial enterprises have used features that we typically associate with games – goals and challenges, point scoring, personalisation and rapid, visible feedback for decades to increase consumer engagement. But what […]
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‘Saving Democracy for Real’ – Panel Discussion
A panel of experts sat down recently at the Democracy Technology Convention in Poland, to tackle just this question and offer some solutions. The discussion benefited from the insights and expertise of EU Special Representative for Human Rights, Eamon Gilmore, Director of Transparencia Brazil, Juliana Sakai and Courteney Mukoyi, Founder of the Justice Code Foundation Trust. The problem, […]
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From Clicktivism to Hacktivism
New technologies provide a range of different participation levels that may favour a broadening, rather than a deepening of engagement. Yet this, according to Dr. Bas Baccarne, senior researcher at imec-MICT-Ghent University, is not necessarily a bad thing.
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What Makes Participatory Budgeting Work in Rybnik?
DT: What motivated you to start Participatory Budgeting in Rybnik? Piotr Kuczera: Participatory Budgeting in Rybnik started in 2013. But the initial idea came in 2009-2010 when a local NGO – the Social Initiatives Development Centre (CRIS) – implemented an innovative citizen participation project aimed at two very different districts of Rybnik. The goal of […]
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Parliamentary Data Should be Open Data
Every parliament, in every city, region, nation or even at EU or UN level, produces large amounts of data every day. Where and how is all this parliamentary data stored? Who should have access to it and why is it important?
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Participatory Budgeting at EU Level – Promises and Pitfalls
What are the promises and the pitfalls of participatory budgeting at the EU level? These questions were discussed on a panel discussion organised by Euractiv, five participants, including Andrea Erdai from the European Commission, Elisa Lironi of the European Citizen Action Service, and Member of the European Parliament Helmut Scholtz, explored the
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EU Citizen Participation — What needs to change?
Democracy Technologies: The Bertelsmann Stiftung published an extensive study last year, 2022, calling for an EU framework for citizen participation. What was the inspiration for this study? Dominik Hierlemann: New forms of citizen participation have become a hot topic with interesting developments all over Europe. We have been involved in the field for quite some […]
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Lessons from Ghent
The city of Ghent in Belgium has a long history of citizen participation and have found that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to participation.
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