ad hoc Committee on e-democracy (CAHDE)

Third meeting Palais de l'Europe, Room 6

Opening of the meeting: 20 May 2008 at 9.30 a.m. Close of the meeting: 21 May 2008 at 5.30 p.m.
Recommendation-Proposal
draft by Madarsz Csaba, conference of INGOs

Strasbourg, 2008.

Background
The working group has a made clear, that e-democracy for creating and maintaining a better democracy means a tool, an extended set of tools and preferred processes. European INGO's and the third sector is a bit behind of the governments (or their experts) in the area of e-democracy consciousness. Mostly they are still thinking and behaving in the old web 1.0 way. This means, that the general media literacy, democracy literacy among the third sector has a limited consciousness related to the e-dynamics (the supporting programmes of the EU - DEMO_Net,
PEP-NET - and the Comission is somehow started to deal with these issues, by giving grants for networks and trainings, that gathers participants from the newly joined member states and put their focus on new e-tools, for example in the field transparency, but there is no general overview exist in the realation of the third sector and e-democracy), and there

is no short way to tackle this problem. However, there are turns, that can be shortcut. Strenghtening the general technology consciousness, highlighting the commmon aspcest of democracy and e-democracy, and introducing the areas and tools for/of e-democracy, is defenately a straightforward approach to create a common field of understanding among the third sector. From this point of view, some of the papers under the CAHDE (for example the Generic practices for e-democracy) is giving a really good base for reuse and to build upon for supporting materials, papers for the civil society, imaginabely under the frame of the Code for Civic Participation.. I see a really good value adding possibilitiy, if some of these insturments of the CAHDE could be re-written, or to be included as an annex, or toolkit created under the flag of the forthcoming Code for Civic Participation. The proposal The toolkit, Generic practices for e-democracy is open and welcome for rebuild, or remixed by the Conference of INGOs in the framework of Civi code for participation. The toolkit can be used and adopted to the INGO's needs.