Article archive: 2014

Democracy makes itself at home online

These are exciting times for new parties, like the UK’s UKIP, Germany’s Alternativ Deutschland, the True Finns and the Swedish Democrats, all of which are benefitting from anger and distrust directed against incumbent politicians and elites. Most are very traditional in their methods, but a few are radically reinventing how parties should work, and here I predict that 2015 will see the emergence of the first Internet-era political party in the UK. Read more +

Designing and testing D-CENT prototypes

D-CENT project started in 2013. Since then, we have conducted workshops with communities in the pilot countries Spain, Finland and Iceland, and did an analysis of distributed social networking, identity eco-systems, social data stores and privacy-aware tools

We continued by merging the technical findings and existing user requirements into technical requirements for the D-CENT platform. In October the technical design document was ready, and plans for pilot implementation were published in November.

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D-CENT piloting in Spain: Improving participatory democracy

Editors: Javier Toret, Pablo Aragón, Antonio Calleja-Lopez

In Spain, the purpose is to offer D-CENT tools for the use of citizen movements moving into the electoral arena. The piloting was launched with two new and influential political groups: Podemos at national level and Guanyem Barcelona at municipal level. More than 1000 people have been involved in the tests with D-CENT prototype (based on DemocracyOS) and Appgree software. Read more +

D-CENT piloting in Finland: Introducing online democracy into decision making

The Finnish pilot of the D-CENT project offers a kit of online tools for active citizens. New kinds of online democracy tools are tested to open up the decision-making of the City of Helsinki and in drafting crowdsourced citizens’ initiatives.

The EU-funded D-CENT project, now in pilot stage, develops next generation tools for online democracy in Helsinki, Barcelona and Reykjavik. The pilot in Helsinki tests a toolkit enabling active citizens to organize into groups and promote their agenda in the context of local decision-making.

“Citizens’ movements are quick and easy to launch online. D-CENT provides tools to make these movements more sustainable and organized”, says Joonas Pekkanen, the project’s democracy expert at Forum Virium Helsinki. Read more +

Interviewing Stefano Lucarelli

Stefano Lucarelli is Assistant Professor in the Political Economy at University of Bergamo, where he teaches International Monetary Economics and Economic Ethics. His interests include monetary theory of production, complementary currencies, financialization, knowledge-based economy and the history of economic thought. Mr. Lucarelli is one of the partners in the D-CENT project.

D-CENT interview: Stefano Lucarelli from D-CENT on Vimeo.

Open and transparent tools, Guanyem Barcelona

The Internet enables democratic participation without intermediaries. Guanyem Barcelona promotes open and transparent public discussion, where everyone can participate. To achieve this, we need open and transparent online tools. Together with the D-CENT project, Guanyem Barcelona´s digital participation team  has developed an improved version of the DemocracyOS software. Here we explain how it works (in Spanish).

Economic Forum panelists discussed local e-governments

Organized since 1992, the Economic Forum has become one of the most important economic events in Europe attended by political and business elites. The 24th Economic Forum was organised in Poland in the 2nd September – 4th September 2014.

The event had six Plenary Sessions and more than 100 panel discussions, lectures, workshops and round table discussions.

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Interviewing Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic Poetician who is currently serving as a member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Pirate Party, and is one of the founders of the party. Birgitta is also the founder and Chairperson of the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), one of the partners in the D-CENT project.

Birgitta has worked as a volunteer and activist for various organizations including WikiLeaks, Saving Iceland, and Friends of Tibet in Iceland. She specializes in lawmaking for the 21st century.

D-CENT interview birgitta jonsdottir vimeo from D-CENT on Vimeo.

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