Pablo Aragón

I went last week to Gdańsk to attend the 7th edition of Personal Democracy Forum Central and Eastern Europe (PDF CEE 2019). The conference, held at the emblematic European Solidarity Centre, is a reference venue for the exchange of experiences from people working for civic participation and transparency in public life with the help of new technologies in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. I contributed by giving workshop on Technopolitical Approaches for the Design of Civic Technologies. In particular, we reviewed examples of how technical decisions are capable of affecting the deliberative capabilities of civic technologies and how to democratically govern digital platforms as done in Metadecidim. Also, I was invited to a very insightful panel entitled “In Technology We Trust. Is Gov Tech the Answer?” to share some lessons learnt from the Decidim experience with:

• Justyna Orłowska, Gov Tech Polska,
• Teele Pehk, Democracy Artist, Changemaker, Urbanist,
• Nataliia Vyniarchuk, Transparency International Ukraine,
• Marek Tejchman, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna (moderator).

Furthermore, the two-days conference was followed by the third edition of the one-day Festival of Civic Tech for Democracy in which I discussed in another exciting panel entitled “Digital-enabled citizen engagement” with:

• Aferdita Pustina, OSCE Mission in Kosovo,
• Viktor Gursky, Social Boost,
• Krzysztof Garski, The City of Gdansk,
• Michał Hetmański, Instrat Foundation (moderator).

Broadly speaking, the experience at Gdańsk was a unique opportunity to discover people, organizations and projects of great interest for building trust in the public sphere.