The second speaker was Vukosava Crnjanski from
a civil society organisation active in e-participation
in Serbia. CRTA is a group of journalists and
political activists working to improve government
transparency and to motivate citizens and media
to hold politicians accountable. She presented
some interesting tools they have introduced in
society such as the Open Parliament initiative or
the “Truthometer”, an initiative that evaluates
elected officials statements for their truthfulness,
consistency and whether they fulfil campaign
promises or policy pledges. She talked about the
main challenges in Serbia such as the fact that
accountability is a new concept for many or the
low level of awareness and interest in policy from
the citizens. Her organisation is finding ways to reengage citizens through ICT.
had different approaches on organising their
e-participation activities and what age groups they
targeted. Some partners chose to focus on seniors,
others on families and some exclusively on youth,
sharing with them the tools.
Participants at almost all tables said that, apart
from the newly introduced e-Participation day,
their experience with e-participation activities was
limited. They believe that people use e-participation
tools mostly on their own devices, from home.
When they do, they use rather local/national
e-participation tools, primarily for e-government
services, such as accessing documents.
In some telecentres, they have noticed that people
find it hard to believe that these tools can change
anything.
Motivation
comes from the need to
use participation tools.
People want to participate
in political issues when
they are affected by the
topic, as seen in the TTIP
demonstrations and many
petitions on local levels.
Therefore, the promotion of
e-participation tools would
be most effective when
combined with current affairs and especially when
citizens feel they are directly affected.
Vladimir Radunovic, director
of e-Diplomacy programmes at
Diplo Foundation, talked about
the e-competences needed for
e-participation. He explained
that these main competences
are:
curation,
creation,
communication, critique and
collaboration. He expanded
on these competences, what
other sub-competences they
include and how they can be learned. For Vladimir
e-participation is about management of information
online and management of knowledge online. Since
many citizens still do not know how to do these It is also important to promote confidence in the
things online, telecentres could indeed fill the gap tools and their results. For this, telecentre staff
and help them acquire these competences.
needs to be trained how to use the tools and how
to make them attractive to citizens. Only when
Table discussions
staff is appropriately trained, can promotional and
awareness raising activities be effective.
All the E-uropa project partners from 12 different
countries had an active role in the session, especially As a conclusion, participants of most tables were in
in the table discussions where they introduced their favour of establishing the European e-Participation
activities during the first European e-participation Day as a regular, annual campaign. Some of
Day (held on May 7th, 2015). All project partners the participants suggested including also nonEU e-participation tools, and especially those at
national and lo cal level.
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