Participants at the nonformal education lab in Gura Portitei, Romania

The Romanian Agency for the Youth in Action Program organized the nonformal education lab at Gura Portitei, in Romania. SMART Method of Public Policy was one of the 14+ methods that were tested. During one day, I made 5 theoretical presentations for the 45 participants, followed by two sessions of practical training. As a result, the young people who expressed a deeper interest in the method published three problems of Romanian public concern, along with one or two solutions:

1. The personnel from the foster care placement centers: many times, the personnel is poorly trained; this is affecting the children who often end up begging on the streets, instead of living a responsible and independent life.
2. The nonformal education in schools: schools in Romania do not have spaces
   

   Gura Portitei, Romania

   adjusted for nonformal education that stimulate the creativity of young pupils.

3. Clean Cincis: Cincis is a lake nearby Hunedoara that is usually very polluted.

Any person can now offer solutions to these three problems on www.PoliticiPublice.ro. Publishing problems and solutions means making the first two steps in the framework of SMART Method of Public Policy. In step 3, we issue a policy paper to decision makers to solve the problems using the solution/s given by citizens. Step 4 means that an official answer is received from the authorities and step 5 means that the problem poster is satisfied with the answer or action of the public institutions.

But the nonformal education lab was also a nice place to socialize. Gura Portitei is an interesting wild place surrounded by the salty waters of the Black Sea on one side and the sweet inland waters. You can reach the place only by boat.

Arrival in Gura Portitei:

Some social activities on lipovean traditions next to a camp fire does not hurt:

Departure, with all the participants:

Working group on promoting access to e-participation: Nicky (UK/Holland/Sudan), Radu (Romania), Federico (Italy), and Claire (Belgium/France).

The recommendations below are aimed at making e-participation more important in generating change in the community. They are the result of the working group on “promoting access to e-participation” organized within the Expert Seminar New Ways of Participation in Multicultural Youth Work from Budapest, Council of Europe Youth Center, during June 14-18 2010. Good working time with Nicky, Federico and Claire .

Recommendations to Youth organizations. They should:

• Empower, develop and promote the use of e-participation tools such as social networks, interactive platforms, audio-video materials, to their members. These tools should be structured and developed into a strategy to approach disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Combine the e-participation tools with regular face-to-face meetings.
• Organize trainings and workshops to develop e-participation skills.
• Engage authorities and civil society representatives in virtual meetings in order to shorten the distance between the two sides and generate a structured dialogue.
• Create e-learning opportunities for young people, adjusted to the specific problems of their disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Develop e-youth work to prevent dangers on the web, by training courses and exchanges of good practices.
• Network better between themselves to exchange good practices, success stories and tools of participation and e-participation.

Recommendations to Researchers. They should:

• Create evaluation tools to monitor the effectiveness of e-participation activities in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Better identify and explain the status-quo or the problems in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Implement specific participatory endeavors to young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Identify the disadvantaged neighborhoods and shape their profiles.

Recommendations to Policy makers (local, regional and national authorities). They should:

• Develop free internet coverage in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
• Develop and encourage structural dialogue so that at least once a month they are engaged in participation or e-participation activities.
• Support the work of youth organizations by providing materials, spaces and funding opportunities to them.
• Be more engaged in partnership agreements with NGOs and the private sector to attract more resources to the local community.
• Offer recognition to the participation and e-participation activities that make a difference in the community.
• Use grants/vouchers/other types of support to help young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods to acquire technological equipment.
• Train policy makers in the benefits of e-participation opportunities in their line of work.
• Ensure the presence of at least one youth centre adequately equipped with computers and other materials necessary for e-participation, in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Have user- and youth-friendly websites.
• Have multiple language support of the websites of public authorities in multi-ethnic neighborhoods.

Recommendations to European institutions. They should:

• Encourage all of the member states to develop the job of youth worker.
• Develop the profile of e-youth work.
• Act as the driving force to implement policy change at a high European level.
• Organize and support training courses at European level for e-youth work. They could be long-term and sustainable, followed-up by e-platforms.
• CoE recommend the members of CLRAE to encourage and be more involved in e-participation activities in their neighborhoods.
• CoE use CLRAE to share good practices of e-participation as a way to solve or better address community problems.
• The European Commission could allocate more resources to help disadvantaged communities use e-participation tools.
• European institutions could make participation in disadvantaged neighborhoods a priority in their line of action.
• European Commission should make a more effective promotion of the e-consultations on various topics when working on draft papers.

More details can be found on ENTER project website.

• To explore the concepts of youth participation and e-participation.
• To explore current trends of e-participation in multicultural youth work.
• To explore the challenges of inclusive multicultural youth work and how e-participation can be a tool to overcome these.
• To analyze the motivation of young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods for e-participation, as well as the effects of e-participation on their social inclusion and democratic participation.
• To exchange experiences and good practices of e-participation in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• To explore ways of overcoming digital divide and ensuring that e-participation is democratic, inclusive, meaningful and empowering for young people.
• To make recommendations on promoting  e-participation as a mean to support the access to social rights for young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Here’s a presentation of the results of a working group on challenges to youth participation and e-participation:

There are some good research documents that the Council of Europe has issued so far. They include the “Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life,” the manual “Have your say!” which is related to the implementation of the Charter with young people, the report of the seminar “New ways of participation based on information technologies” organised by the DYS in 2009 where SMART Method of Public Policy is also mentioned, and the Agenda 2020. The seminar is organized under the framework of ENTER project on access to social rights for young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

And here are some relevant photos:

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The International Conference on Administration and Business

The Faculty of Business and Administration from the University of Bucharest is organizing the International Conference on Administration and Business during June 4-5, 2010. I am attending the Education, Administration and Law Section, with the paper “Online vs. Offline vs. Mixed Participation for Better Governmental Policy-Making.” This paper is focusing on the area of participative democracy from my thesis. Here are some conclusions:

SolveNet (term referring to a hypothetical better citizen engagement model) is a combination of online and offline citizen engagement. It benefits from advantages specific to the online dialogue like little to no cost of use, flexibility of participants to give solutions to problems of public concern, educational approach, and interactivity among the participants. At the same time, SolveNet is coping with the disadvantages of offline engagement, like the lack of accountability of the end result of a participation endeavor, limited time and money of participants to offer input in pressing community problems, polarization of discussions, and lack of knowledge about issues.

As the majority of the work is done online, the policy-making process is pushed further using the authority of a legally established

nonprofit organization. This way, the most feasible, valuable and sustainable solution proposals from citizens, are sent to the desks of elected and appointed officials.

The participation model lacks the advantages of face-to-face discussions between the participants, but the online citizen engagement platform offers an interactive participation experience that allows people from different regions to work together creatively in solving community problems. The people who participate are not representative for any given community. That is why the main focus is on the quality of the solutions that are exchanged on the platform and not on the background of the citizens.

SolveNet faces however the problem that every participation model has: effectiveness in generating a change of policy. It is ultimately up to the decision-makers to consider the results of any participative democracy exercise or not. The main advantage of SolveNet is in this case the little effort that every-day people make, in order to make their voices heard in the community.

A mixed participation model to support governmental decision-making seems to work the best, in order to benefit the most from citizen engagement. This model has to provide for authority, accountability, creativity, exchange of constructive ideas, educational approach, and perseverance. Future research could identify such a model and showcase it.

Rollups for the 4 national citizen engagement platfoms serving "SMART Method of Public Policy" in Romania, France, Italy, and Greece

The international workshop “Public Policies Made by Citizens,” financed by the European Commission, has ended. The European citizen engagement platform available at www.public-policies.eu, as well as the national citizen engagement platforms for Romania (www.politicipublice.ro), Italy (www.politiche-pubbliche.it), France (www.politiquespubliques.fr), and Greece (www.public-policies.gr) have been tested and are now ready to be used. However, we have yet to do the content of the menus. Here’s the result of our work in terms of problems and solutions posted:

• www.public-policies.eu: 10 problems and 13 solutions
• www.politicipublice.ro: 18 problems and 31 solutions
• www.politiquespubliques.fr: 2 problems and 1 solution
• www.politiche-pubbliche.it: 4 problems
• www.public-policies.gr: 3 problems

Every platform serves “SMART Method of Public Policy.” The most difficult parts are to define the problem of public concern and to offer a valuable, feasible and sustainable solution to it. So….a big hand to the participants!

The management team of the project "Public Policies Made by Citizens" - www.Public-Policies.eu: Andrea (Italy), Joanna (Greece), Guillaume (France), and Radu (Romania)

During May 17-23, the international workshop “Public Policies Made by Citizens” is taking place in Moeciu, Romania. We are together 21 young people from four countries – Romania, Italy, Greece and France – who are coordinating the five platforms of participative democracy available at this moment:

• www.Public-Policies.eu for Europe
• www.PoliticiPublice.ro for Romania
• www.Politiche-Pubbliche.it for Italy
• www.PolitiquesPubliques.fr for France
• www.Public-Policies.gr for Greece
  

Besides testing the steps of “SMART Method of Public Policy” and identifying opportunities to generate greater leverage to the participation attempts of every day citizens, we are also publishing problems of European, national and local public concern, as well as solutions.

This workshop is the first major attempt to develop “SMART Method of Public Policy” to a new level, that would generate the first success stories of participation. A success story happens when a problem of public concern that is published on one of our citizen engagement platforms is solved by a public institution, using the five steps of SMART Method.

Today we created a new video to promote the European platform www.Public-Policies.eu:

And of course, we have some photos from the first three days:

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PoliticiPublice.ro at NGOfest 2010

NGOfest has been a real success for “SMART Method of Public Policy” and for the citizens who used the citizen engagement platform www.PoliticiPublice.ro (www.Public-Policies.eu for Europe). They published problems regarding public health, education, environment, research/innovation, social relations and unemployment, but also offered solutions to the problems that were already posted on the website. The participation is interactive, stimulating and within a couple of seconds you can see your solutions and problems online. We also awarded “Good Citizen” certificates to everybody who stopped at the PoliticiPublice.ro tent and participated to generate better policy making.

Simona and Daniel were the volunteers who made sure that citizens will make their voices better heard in the community.

CONGRATULATIONS CITIZENS!

Here are some photos:

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Be a "good citizen"

Friday, Saturday and Sunday (May 7-9) we are attending NGOfest with the project “Public Policies Made by Citizens.” We’ll be awarding certificates of “GOOD CITIZEN” to the good citizens who will be publishing solutions to the problems of public concern posted on www.PoliticiPublice.ro or www.Public-Policies.eu. The methodology is simple: you walk around, visit our stand, sit on the “good citizen chair,” publish your solution or raise a problem on the website, we take you a picture, and give you the certificate.

NGOfest is the most important event of the civil society in Romania and a promoter of voluntary behavior and public participation. Nonetheless, it brings the non-governmental organizations closer to the citizens. FDSC, the organizer of the event, wishes to increase the number of people who are more active in the community, to develop the organizational behavior and to increase the involvement of the NGOs in the Romanian society. Source: www.ongfest.ro.

We thank ANPCDEFP through Youth in Action Program for making the participation of SMART Development Centre possible. This is a wonderful opportunity to promote the project “Public Policies Made by Citizens” and thus use SMART Method of Public Policy to make our voices better heard in the community.