This year the City of Helsinki is rethinking its approach to citizen participation and bottom-up citizen empowerment. The D-CENT project has impacted the roadmap of current e-participation tools in Helsinki by creating open processes, tools, code, and standards. The public beta of the democracy tool developed as part of the D-CENT Helsinki pilot has now been launched as Decisions Helsinki. Read more +
Writer: Eva Rueda
From Paris to Iceland, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Spain. Researchers, municipal technicians and activists from different countries have shared their new batch of direct democracy strategies, open source software, and citizen participation, in the context of Democracy Lab, at the Democratic Cities: Commons Technology and Right to a Democratic City gathering organized by the D-CENT Project and Madrid’s Town Council. Read more +
Decide Madrid is an open consultation and direct democracy platform launched by the city of Madrid after the recent municipal elections. It enables citizens to propose, debate, prioritise and implement policy for the city. Read more +
D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies) is the biggest European project on direct democracy and citizen engagement. It is a flagship project that reshapes the future of digital democracy, by supporting large scale pilots and research on network democracy, new forms of citizen participation and the governance of digital commons.
Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city taking place from the 23–28 May in Madrid, will gather together +400 participants to discuss network democracy, new forms of citizen participation, digital tools for democratic participation, and urban commons for democratic cities. The International Conference (27-28 May, Museo Reina Sofia) will conclude the week’s activities, and is the final event of the D-CENT project.
Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city taking place from the 23–28 May in Madrid, will gather together +400 participants to discuss network democracy, new forms of citizen participation, digital tools for democratic participation, and urban commons for democratic cities. The event begins with a five-day Democracy Lab (23–27 May, Medialab-Prado) delivering workshops, hackathons and open sessions to develop, think and design tools, processes and strategies for democratic participation. Read more +
Róbert Bjarnason is the co-founder of the Citizens Foundation, a non-profit organisation helping citizens to get their voices heard and participate in governance. Together with International Modern Media Institute, Citizens Foundation it runs the Icelandic pilot, in which the D-CENT tools are being developed and tested with the end users.
During the past two years, D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies) has been working to transform democracy in a very concrete way: helping movements, cities, and political parties to build technologies, methods and tools that can make the democratic system more in-sync with collective aspirations of the 21st century.
To showcase and celebrate our results, a week-long programme of activity is taking place from the 23–28 May in Madrid, Spain. Welcome! #DCENTMadrid #DemocraticCities Read more +
On the 20-21 April, Net futures 2016 gathered over 1.000 attendees in Brussels to discuss European Digital Single Market Strategy, Future internet, Cloud, 5G, and the Internet of Things, among others. Our coordinator Francesca Bria from Nesta Innovation Lab was presenting in a workshop diving into sharing economy. In this interview, Francesca Bria explains how technology is being used to help facilitate direct democracy and citizen engagement. Bria also is active in grassrooots movements advocating for open access, knowledge commons and open, decentralised privacy aware technologies. Read more +
On the 18th of April 2016, D-CENT organised together with the Five Star Movement Italy an event diving into network democracy and new forms of citizen participation. The event brought together 150 participants – politicians, activists, academics, developers – to discuss the future of direct democracy. Thank you for all participants! Read more +
To showcase and celebrate the results of the D-CENT project a week-long programme of activity Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city is taking place from the 23-28 May in Madrid, Spain. The week begins with a five-day Democracy Lab (23-27 May) delivering workshops, hackathons and open sessions. The call is now open for sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. Read more +
