I’m very pleased to announce that Nick Booth, founder of Birmingham social enterprise podnosh and recent winner of the Prime Minister’s Big Society award, will be speaking at the PEP-NET Summit 2012 in Hamburg on 14th May. Nick is best known for his social media surgeries, regular meetings at which volunteers help active citizens get to grips [...]

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The PEP-NET Summit 2012 will take place on 14th May 2012 at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. We are looking forward to an interactive event with plenty of space for networking and discussion. Anybody who is interested in eParticipation, at all levels of experience, is invitedto attend. With an audience of European eparticipation enthusiasts, [...]

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Europeans who have felt left out in the past few weeks have now got their very own achronym to rally around. Hot on the heels of the successful campaign against SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect Intellectual Property Act”) comes ACTA (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”). A secretly-negotiated deal to protect intellectual property would always [...]

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The Region of Hanover (yes, that’s the correct English spelling) has dropped its Facebook page due to data protection concerns. Kommune21, an E-Government magazine, reports that recent statements from some of Germany’s regional Data Protection Commissioners (the best known example coming from Schleswig-Holstein) led the region to take drastic steps, despite the advantages of the [...]

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The Asociación Ciudades Kyosei is a small civic organization whose aim is to foster Civic Engagement by means of ICT. It was founded in 2006 and is the oldest Spanish NGO devoted to the promotion of (e)Participation. In the last years we were researching on the field of Civic Engagement and ICT, with a special [...]

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In modern democracies, people are to be empowered by means of information and communication technologies. Transparency and access to data, new ways of interacting with government and democratic institutions cause profound changes in society. Social media and the new forms of societal behaviour, including content generation, collaboration and sharing as well as network organisation change [...]

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In its recent consultation document ‘Making Open Data Real’, the UK Government expresses high hopes for open data, heralding it as possibly “the most powerful lever of 21st century public policy”. Following several years of open data advocacy, activism and hack days, in the UK open data is moving towards the mainstream thanks to unanimous [...]

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Immigrant Inclusion by eParticipation (IIeP) –project is organizing an international joint workshop dealing with immigrants and cultural minorities and their e-participation processes on November 2-3 2011, Helsinki, Finland. Target groups: Authorities in national and local level involved in e-democracy and e-governance, persons from immigrant and multicultural non-governmental organisations as well as researchers and others in [...]

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At the “Open.gov & e-participation” conference in Belfast on 22nd September I said a few off-the-cuff words about open data in Germany before presenting DEMOS-Plan, the spatial planning consultation software that we have developed together with the local authority in Hamburg. I think it’s fair to say that the open data debate is not quite [...]

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The Consultation Institute  (TCI) have launched what they believe to be the first quality scheme for public engagement software.  Software vendors can apply for their tool to be tested against the principals of the TCI consultation charter which is a set of good practices.   Assurances are also sought from existing customers and the package of [...]

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