Open call results: Great interest in the Democracy Lab Unconference in Madrid

As part of the Democracy Lab that started on Monday in Madrid, we organise a two-day Unconference from Wednesday to Thursday (25-26 May). This event dives into Initiatives for open democracy and a decentralised Internet. Through an Open Call, we looked for groups and individuals to contribute to the sessions. Now we are very happy to introduce some of chosen participants!

The Democracy Lab Unconference (25-26 May) will include lightning talks, hands on workshops and presentations selected and scheduled by attendees on the day.

Our recent Open Call was looking for groups and individuals to contribute to the sessions. It produced the amazing 60 competing proposals from different disciplines, all very promising.

We are now happy to introduce some of chosen participants, please see the list below. They are all pioneers in launching new digital democracy tools or starting a discussion understanding citizen rights from a different perspectives, using the opportunities given by new media.

The Unconference format enables you to meet and chat with these thought leaders.

1. Sofía de Roa

Sofía de Roa is a Spanish journalist. She studied Political Campaign at Ortega-Marañon Institute, and Digital Citizienship, Culture and Comunication at Madrid’s Media Lab Prado and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, to research on how to improve the democracy at political parties, allowing public scrutiny and participation, by introducing new forms of internal operation. In particular, she suggests to implement a Quality Indicators System, a method promoted from Asociación Calidad y Cultura Democráticas, organization where she belongs from 2013. She participated at 15M Movement and municipalist project Ganemos Madrid. Currently, she works at Podemos, developing the transparency system.

2. Oliver Sauter

Oliver Sauter is the founder of the project “WorldBrain – Verifying the Internet with Science”, on the quest against (scientific) misinformation and for scientific literacy. Sauter is an Internet fanboy, thinker and tinker, open-Source and Open Data advocate.

3. Javier de la Cueva

Javier de la Cueva holds a Licentiate degree in Law and is Doctor of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. He works as a practicing lawyer. Amongst other cases, he has handled the defence of cases related to usage of free intellectual property licenses and diverse technological platforms. Beside his work as a lawyer and as a lecturer, he is currently engaged in programming technological projects, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Fundación Ciudadana Civio.

4. Manuel Rodríguez

Manu Rodriguez is data researcher and sociologist training. His career has been linked to data analysis and technology, he has spent more than 10 years measuring and analysing data for large companies. Rodriguez is a professor at McKinsey Social Initiative and ISDI. He feels great passion for understanding human motivations through research.

5. Philippe Baret

Philippe Baret is a French freelance journalist and online editor, technical and crowd-sourcing editor at FreedomBox, personal cloud server.

6. Elisa Lewis

Elisa Lewis is an expert in civic innovation and entrepreneurship. She has co-founded “Les Cols Verts”, a social enterprise promoting urban agriculture for vulnerable people. She is the vice-president of “Démocratie Ouverte”, a community gathering elected representatives, members of institutions, social entrepreneurs and citizens developing creative solutions to upgrade democracy in the French-speaking world. She is the co-author of a book on democratic innovations around the world (to be published this summer– La Découverte).

7. Joseph Kim

Joseph Kim has co-fouded WAGL and worked as Project Manager for publication job and global networking. Before that he joined Youth Party Korea for the general election in 2012 as one of the Party’s spokesmen and participated Occupy Seoul National University in May 2011. He recently works on proposing a new model of an innovative party or a crowd-sourced political platform based on citizen participation for South Korea.

8. Maro Horta Maro

Horta is a Human Rights lawyer and a passionate of New Technologies that can help those in need to improve their lives. This is why he is focused on the FairCoop project aiming to create a new economic system to reduce inequalities among human beings. In that sense, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a new development that can help to achieve these goals.

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