CEE Citizens Network's blog

Dear all,

We need your help in gathering background information, statistical data and library resources, and identifying local sources of information  about citizens participation in your countries in order to put together the study on Citizens Participation.

Anka

there was an excellent presentation made this past week at the Committee on Sustainable Territorial Development by Ulrich Bohner who is the Secretary General of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities at the CoE.

here is one quote:
If democracy is the power of people, then people’s participation in power-sharing and decision-making is its essential requirement. It has become especially clear when, looking for reasons for people’s disenchantment with politics and politicians – which is particularly reflected in falling voter turnouts during elections – the international community had to acknowledge a growing feeling among our citizens that they are unable to influence political decisions, that they exist separately from political life, and that they are powerless to change anything. In other words, that they don’t matter.

for the whole speech click on:

https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=1510961&Site=Congress&BackColorInternet=e0cee1&BackColorIntranet=e0cee1&BackColorLogged=FFC679

Chuck

On Thursday 2nd April, we held a one day conference that was joint hosted by our member Crono, the Rural Network  of Romania and the Citizens Network.  There were approximately 50 people present.  Many of the representatives from the Citizen Network members were there for the first time and it was very good to meet such talented and interesting members.  An interesting discussion took place before lunch regarding peoples experience of involving citizens at different phases of community development work.  In the afternoon, there were group reports followed by a very lively discussion about future activities between our groups. A number of interesting and valuable suggesitons were made.  A brief report will be published shortly on our web site along with pictures.

We have invited Jos Lemmers from the Council of Europe to join us in Sofia to discuss Local Democracy Week/ Citizen Participation Week

How R U? We’re sooo happy to work with you

Krzysiek, Veronika & Anka

CEE CN members are debating on e-participation and it’s affect on participation itself.

The PEP-NET is carrying out the E-participation forum at http://www.internet-discourse.eu/
Go and take a visit to read the high topics of e-participation, make your voice heard, get involved!

The second part of the technology focus training, financed by the EC and other resources has been organized in Prague last spring. The second round of the workshop is taking place in Riga, along with the BarcamBaltics.

The programme for both events are impressing.
original project:

Interactive TechTools:

http://techtools.tol.org/

Riga training event

http://itt-riga.wikidot.com/start

Barcamp in Riga

http://barcamp.lv/

After the summer TechTools workshop in Prague, organized by Transitions Online, which has gathered many organizations from the CEE region, dealing with transparency issues and the possibilities of new technologies, the second round of the workshop is boundled together with a Barcamp event, in Riga, Latvia in the begining of February.

Barcamp Latvia

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At the meeting of the Council of Europe Forum for the Future of Democracy held in Sweden in June last year, participants called on the INGO Conference of the Council of Europe to prepare a Code of Good Practice for Civil Participation which should cover questions such as mechanisms for NGO participation in decision-making processes and other forms of citizens’ involvement. The principal objective of this instrument is to contribute to an enabling environment for NGOs in Council of Europe Member States and Belarus by defining at European level, a set of general principles and guidelines for the civil participation in decision-making processes to be implemented at local and national level.

After the ifrst revision of the code, which has been taking place recently in Sweden, we have set up a wiki site for open contributing/commenting to the code.

We encourage all our readers to investigate and participate in the process of making this code better and better.

The Wiki of the Draft Code (which is really simle to use, in 3 minutes, you will get used to all the possibilities) can be found here: http://codeforcivicparticipation.wiki.zoho.com/Introduction.html