Participants of the 2007 BerlinInAugust" summit
|
|
 |
The internet has created a plethora of new opportunities to increase civic participation and to enable citizens to engage actively in societal and political processes. Together with its partner politik-digital.de, the British Council has been mapping developments in this area over the past years by means of a survey and the database e-partipation.net.
In addition, we co-organised the e-democracy summit "BerlinInAugust" which took place at the Hertie School of Governance on 13 and 14 August 2007 and was attended by an international group of leading thinkers and practitioners in this area.
Encouraged by the positive feedback from this event, its organisers agreed to repeat it in a year's time. Thus, on 17 and 18 July, the 2008 e-democracy summit will take place, labelled appropriately "BerlinInJuly" and this time hosted by the British Council on its own premises. The overall purpose of "BerlinInJuly" will be to find out how the internet can be used to improve the communication between citizens and political institutions, and which tools could be built to help our democracies work better. More specifically, it will explore, from different country perspectives, new formats of online deliberation and consultation.
Applying the open space concept, the sessions will be facilitated by Christian Heise from e-politik.de/e-demokratie.org and Simone Gerdesmeier from politik-digital.de; with contributions by Tom Steinberg from MySociety.org in the UK as well as Leonard Novy from the Bertelsmann Foundation. The audience will include some of last year's guests as well as some new people as a result of important new networks in the field having been informed about the meeting. In total, about 35 delegates are expected to attend the invitation-only conference.
|
|
