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!

The event was an excellent showing of all the different movements, projects and experiments that are changing democracy in Europe. Together we explored innovative methods and digital tools to strengthen large scale citizen participation in the political process at European level.

The programme included three panels discussing new citizen movements, citizen participation, and transparency of political institutions. Among the 20 speakers were Luigi Di Maio (M5S), Bruno Kaufmann (Democracy International), Isabella Adinolfi (M5S), Renata Avila (World Wide Web Foundation), Evgeny Morozov (author), and Miguel Ongil (Podemos). The D-CENT team was sharing its experiences from Iceland (participatory platform Your Priorities), Helsinki (participatory work of the city of Helsinki) and Spain (Decide Madrid).

The afternoon workshops were a chance to change ideas in smaller groups of participants related to direct democracy and digital tools for participation.

The intensive day was full of interesting presentations and discussions, including panels both in Italian and English. Twitter hashtag #democraziainrete was lively with comments, pics, remarks and discussion in both languages. We have shared some of the tweets and pics in this post (see below).

Video capture (in Italian): http://webtv.camera.it/evento/9329