Niall Firth writes in the New Scientist (24 April 2015) about digital democracy and the potential of online tools to revitalise old democratic practices.
“New online tools are revitalising old democratic practices, bypassing the political middlemen and even offering the prospect of a world without politicians at all”, the article says.
Exciting news! We have set the date and preliminary agenda for the next D-CENT event. On May 5th, we will be hosting a conference in Barcelona which dives into Network democracy for a better city. Our plan is to inspire a great number of high-level policy makers, academics, activists, civic society organisations, and hackers to debate the future of democratic City Governments.
Together we will explore new ways of strengthening citizens’ participation in the political process presenting already existing digital tools for a more participatory democracy. We will also discuss how future democratic city infrastructures and governments should look like.
Writers: Darryl Chamberlain & Francesca Bria (Nesta)
Representatives of the groups involved in D-CENT met in London to share their experiences. Jaakko Korhonen of Open Knowledge Foundation Finland talked about D-CENT’s potential.
What are you doing for D-CENT?
I’ve been doing research and development work and design work, and have colleagues that are working on participation, community management and more. There’s a network of people who are trying to find citizen-oriented democracy opportunities and there’s only a handful of organisations with the capability to accelerate this.
Maybe it comes from being in a small circle, but we keep ourselves away from the stuff that we’re not responsible for, so the decision-makers don’t get confused!
