Democracy makes itself at home online

Democracy Projectadmin 22nd December 2014

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

Democracy Pilots Projectadmin 22nd December 2014

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.

Pilots in Iceland: Boosting bottom-up municipal democracy

Democracy Pilots Projectadmin 19th December 2014

The piloting in Iceland focuses on improving and upgrading the online democracy software Your Priorities and utilizing it for D-CENT. The idea is to bring in new functionalities pointed out by users of the Better Reykjavík and Better Iceland websites. Read more +

D-CENT piloting in Spain: Improving participatory democracy

Democracy Pilots Projectadmin 19th December 2014

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

Democracy Pilotsadmin 9th December 2014

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 +