On August 27th, 2015, Crowd Dialog Europe gathered representatives from 28 European countries to Helsinki to discuss latest trends on crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and crowdinnovation. D-CENT participated the event by hosting a workshop discussing new e-democracy tools for cities.

The Crowd Dialog Europe 2015 gathered the European crowd knowledge to Helsinki: business, academia and politics. The intensive day brought us 15 minutes talks in the main stage, as well as parallel workshop and panel sessions.

The opening speech was given by the Mayor of Helsinki, Jussi Pajunen. He gave insight on Helsinki as an open, smart city. The keynotes included, among others, Bert-Ola Bergstrand, International thought leader, pioneer and movement builder; David Wilcox, Founder of ReachScale; Karol Krol, Founder & Vicepresident at Collaborative Economy Centre; and Tanja Aschenbeck-Florange, Partner Osborne at Clarke Law Experts.

Workshop: New eDemocracy Era and Tools for Cities

In conjunction to the main stage programme, D-CENT hosted a workshop diving into online participation and new tools for e-democracy. How cities could and should enable more active crowdsourcing and collective actions of citizens? The session explored the best cases in Helsinki, as well as harvested the experiences of the workshop participants.

As Helsinki is one of the piloting countries of the D-CENT project, this was also a chance to share our plans for local piloting, aiming to create and test a feed service that helps to monitor the decision making of the City of Helsinki.

“In the Finnish pilot of D-CENT, we will provide an alert which will give you a heads up when the city council or committee handle issues that interest you. It can be changes in your residential area or favourite dog park, for example,” explain Joonas Pekkanen and Jaakko Korhonen, hosting the workshop.

“When a topic of your interest comes up, you can act. One can form a group to influence decision-making. The group can figure out the most efficient way to promote – or oppose – a project.”

http://www.crowddialog.eu

Crowd Dialog Europe 2015 was organised by the EU Commission, DIGILE, Estonian investment agency and the city of Helsinki. D-CENT project participated the event by hosting a workshop together with D-CENT partner Forum Virium Helsinki and the city of Helsinki.

This Blog was originally published on dcentproject.eu. View the blog here.