SMART Development Centre
SMART Development Centre is a nonprofit and non-partisan association, established in 2003.
The Mission of the Association is to engage people in providing valuable, sustainable and feasible solutions to problems of public concern. We envision a world where all people are collaborative problem solvers, proactively address issues important to society and develop satisfactory policies to make positive improvements to their lives and their communities.
My activity with SMART Development Centre resumes to implementing “SMART Method of Public Policy,” through the project “Public Policies Made by Citizens.” In my vision, public policy simply means solving problems of public concern through feasible, sustainable and valuable solutions. Technically, the project consists of a network of websites that use the same method of participation that allows people to offer solutions to problems of public concern at every level of government.
I created SMART Method of Public Policy as a result of attending the Master of Public Policy Program from Pepperdine University. That is where I learned about deliberative democracy and the various citizen engagement programs that are aimed at getting citizen input on issues of importance to local or larger communities. I also learned about the barriers of participation like lack of time and money and I saw this as an opportunity for the project “Public Policies Made by Citizens.”
SMART Method of Public Policy is briefly explained through the graph below:
SMART Method of Public Policy
“SMART Method of Public Policy” was presented at the seminarВ “New Ways of Youth Participation Based on Information and Communication Technologies” that I attended at the Youth Center of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France in March 2009. As a result, the Council of Europe published my method of participation as a good practice example of participative democracy (see the report). This came as a confirmation that the project “Public Policies Made by Citizens” is on the right track and that it needs to be developed to cover every country down to the county level. This is exactly what we are going to do!
