How can citizen's crowdsourcing foster democracy in Europe?

Representatives of the URBAN INNO project and Smart City Maribor initiative replied the invitation to international conference entitled "How can citizen's crowdsourcing foster democracy in Europe? The event was held on 26. October 2016 in Ljubljana within the organization of the Institute for electronic Participation and network of Non-governmental organizations for the inclusive society.

The main purpose of the conference was to discuss various aspects of the large-scale people participation (Crowdsourcing) in democratic life and policy decisions on a national and European level. The purpose was also to present practical examples and to define the framework for the use of innovative methods of e-participation on the case of mass participation in the democratic debate about the future of the European Union.

The main objectives of the conference were:

to reflect on the crowdsourcing and other e-participation experiences at national level by presenting case studies / lessons learned;
to discuss technological, societal, cultural, political challenges for citizens, organizers and decision-makers when crowdsourcing for politics and policy;
to brainstorm a draft framework for an EU level pilot of crowdsourcing on the future of Europe based on the analysis of 25 international examples of crowdsourcing initiatives assessed against a set of objectives relevant for the EU decision-making process;
to reflect on both the most suitable policies to be crowdsourced at EU level and the most appropriate e-participation tools to be used based on the national experience;
to identify and map influencers, drivers, supporters and promoters of crowdsourcing as an innovative, deliberative method of e-participation based on ICT.

Representatives of URBAN INNO project and Smart City Maribor initiative presented project URBAN INNO as best practice on how the urban innovation projects can contribute to strengthen citizen participation and open innovation through participatory methods in European regions. Practical examples of citizens' cooperation with the city were also presented in the form of participatory tools of Municipality of Maribor, called Let’s improve Maribor and Participatory Budget of one of the city quarters. The practical examples of Municipality of Maribor were the only actual implemented practices among presented cases, which were not in beta version or draft version or pilots or similar.