On the 8th of July 2015, D-CENT is organizing a Round Table discussion with citizens activists, social movements, and the developers of the new open source democracy tools. The event is a part of CAPS 2015 – the second International event on Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation taking place on 7-8 July, Bruxelles.
The discussion will focus on questions like: How can we transform the political system and devolve power to citizens? What kind of online tools and digital infrastructures are needed to truly empower citizens in the democratic context? What kind of self-governance models can we adopt to build the new digital commons? What are shortfalls and strengths of government procured centralised platforms (e.g. the ECI), commercial social networking services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and open source democratic technology initiatives (e.g. CAPS, D-CENT, p2pvalue).
The D-CENT Round Table and CAPS 2015 conference are free of charge but require registration: http://caps-conference.eu/#section-register
The discussion, starting at 14:40, is chaired by Francesca Bria, D-CENT coordinator from Nesta. Other speakers include Aral Balkan (Ind.ie), Jaakko Korhonen (Open Knowledge Finland), Daniel Freund (Transparency International EU), Carsten Berg (The ECI Campaign), Miguel Arana Catania (LaboDemo), Gareth Rogers (ThoughtWorks), Joonas Pekkanen (Open Ministry), Samer Hassan (P2PValue project) and Fabrizio Sestini (DG Connect, European Commission).
Please tweet with #DCENT and #caps2015 to pose questions to our speakers.
About the speakers:
Francesca Bria, Chair
Francesca Bria is a Nesta Senior Project Lead in the Nesta Innovation Lab. She is the EU Coordinator of the D-CENT project on decentralised platforms for network democracy and social digital currencies and the she is the Principle Investigator of the DSI project on digital social innovation in Europe.
Francesca is a senior Adviser on technology and information policy. She has a background in social science and innovation economics with a PhD from Imperial College London where she was a researcher and teaching associate in the Innovation Studies Centre – Digital Economy Lab.
Francesca is a member of the Internet of Things Council and an advisor for the European Commission on Digital Social Innovation, Future Internet, Internet of Things and Smart Cities policy. She is also a member of the EC Expert Group on Open Innovation (OISPG) and one of the Coordinators of Activity Chain 8: Societal at IERC IoT Research Cluster of the EU Commission (IERC).
Francesca has been advising the City of Rome and the Region of Lazio and other public bodies on innovation, open technology and information policy. She is also active in various grassrooots movements advocating for open access, knowledge commons, citizen empowerment and decentralised privacy-aware technologies. Follow Francesca on Twitter: @francesca_bria
Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan is the founder and lead designer of Ind.ie, a social enterprise creating independent alternatives to what he calls Spyware 2.0.
Aral’s work protects fundamental freedoms, human rights, and democracy by creating independent consumer technologies that don’t spy on you. He is currently working on coding the core of the Ind.ie platform, a beautiful distributed social network called Heartbeat. Follow Aral on Twitter: @Aral
Jaakko Korhonen
Jaakko is a interaction designer with background in public sector, startups as well as in multinational enterprise. Jaakko loves making, and getting things done. He leads the Fluency Navigator, Biodiversity Map-, D-CENT and Freedom Of Information projects at Open Knowledge Finland. Follow Jaakko on Twitter: @jaakkokorhonen
Daniel Freund
Policy Officer EU Integrity, Transparency International EU, Brussels
Daniel joined TI in July 2014 and is leading the work on the integrity of the EU institutions. He works on issues around lobbying, conflicts of interest and legislative transparency and has launched EU Integrity Watch – a unique online tool to monitor the outside incomes of members of the European Parliament as well as lobbying activities in Brussels.
Before joining TI, Daniel has worked in and around the EU institutions for five years. Most recently he worked at the European Parliament. He has previously worked at the EU delegation to Hong Kong, the German Foreign Ministry, the French civil service academy ENA and Deloitte Consulting. Daniel holds degrees from Sciences Po Paris, George Washington and Leipzig University. Follow Daniel on Twitter: @daniel_freund
Carsten Berg
Carsten Berg is coordinator of The ECI Campaign. He is a political scientist and obtained a degree in political science from the University Potsdam and a Masters in Education from Alanus University Bonn. He has campaigned for participatory and direct democracy at regional, national and transnational levels. Moreover he has given university lectures on participatory democracy and served as expert and adviser to parliaments and international NGOs. In 2002-2003, Mr. Berg worked for Mehr Demokratie e.V. in the Convention on the Future of Europe and successfully campaigned for the inclusion of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) into EU law. Since then he continues to contribute to the emergence of the ECI as General Coordinator of The ECI Campaign.
Miguel Arana Catania
Madrid city council participation project Director. LaboDemo Co-founder. Digital Participation teams of Podemos and Ahora Madrid.
Miguel Arana is the Director of the Madrid city council participation project. He has been actively involved in the 15M movement in Spain since its beginning, with an emphasis in the digital tools and the connection of the movement with other countries. Co-founder of LaboDemo, organization dedicated to design, implementation and development of participation strategies and digital tools. He has been working in the participation team of Podemos and Ahora Madrid, defining the participation strategy of the parties, and at the European level designing new tools for the future democracy in the D-CENT project.
Gareth Rogers
Gareth is the Technical Lead for the ThoughtWorks development team working on DCENT. He has a wide variety of technical expertise through the full development stack from deployment infrastructure and back end systems to front end and web interfaces. Gareth has worked with both private and public sector clients as a software developer, coach, facilitator and business analyst. He brings skills in developing user-focussed products using agile and lean methodologies. Follow Gareth on Twitter: @gtrogers
Joonas Pekkanen
Joonas works has been working as an Open Democracy Expert on the D-CENT project. He is the founder of Open Ministry crowdsourcing of legislation project, active in the Finnish Open Government Partnership process, Open Knowledge Finland and Transparency International Finland board member and activist in the Open Democracy Finland Working group. Joonas has a master’s in finance, studies in law and has experience as a co-founder in several mobile and internet startups. Follow Joonas on Twitter: @joonaspekkanen
Samer Hassan
Samer Hassan is an activist, researcher and Assistant Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). He has carried out research in the University of Surrey (UK) and the American University of Science & Technology (Lebanon). He has more than 45 publications in Computer Science and Social Sciences. Engaged in free/open source projects, he co-funded the Comunes Nonprofit and the Move Commons project. He’s UCM Principal Investigator in FP7 P2Pvalue project on Commons-based peer production.
Fabrizio Sestini
Fabrizio Sestini is Senior Expert (Advisor) in Digital Social Innovation within the unit “Net Innovation” of DG CONNECT of the European Commission. He is leading the team managing the multidisciplinary initiative “Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation”, which aims at stimulating bottom-up innovative ideas for collaborative platforms exploiting network effects (in networks of people, knowledge and sensors) to include citizens, grassroots organisations and civil society in participatory social innovation processes. On Twitter: @100fabrizio
