Tobias Escher at the OII

Monday and Tuesday of this week saw an event happening that I have been looking forward to very much: Berlin in August, an informal summit of European eDemocracy practitioners, which has been organised by politik-digital and MySociety. The gathering took place in the former Staatsratsgebaeude (see picture) which used to house the government of the former German Democratic Republic. It was an odd choice of place given that this building used to be a place of secrecy and ignorance whilst our whole little (un)conference was all about how to make government more transparent and to give citizens a voice (e.g. through deliberation or petitions).

The participants did discuss a stunning array of eDemocracy projects that have already made a mark in their countries although maybe not all being as widely successful as they would deserve. It definitely helped to open my eyes to a world beyond some of the more commonly known projects such as theyworkforyou.com in the UK or abgeordnetenwatch.de in Germany and to learn about a variety of other efforts. For example, who would have thought that Romania has taken such a lead in holding government and parliament accountable to the extent that they sue their politicians every time information is not made available? Or the kind of interesting results you get if you can cross-reference the voting behaviour of an MP with data on its travels (seems like some politicians can be at multiple places at once). There is a good (and still growing) list of interesting sites available on our Wiki.

You can meet some of the participants in brief video interviews (the web site is in German but they interviews are in English) that hopefully convey some of the buzz of these two days. As this was an (un)conference it was difficult to say what the outcomes would be. This actually did work quite well: We came up with a long list of good practice for transparency sites that should be the first point of call for people thinking about setting up similar sites. Furthermore the collected wisdom of the experts did identify a number of projects that a crying out to be done by someone! Most importantly, however, it was an opportunity for all to network and to learn what is going on in Europe and also beyond as Andrea Thompson and Gilberto Buffara from democracia in Brazil joined us for a session via video call.