Personal Democracy Forum Europe Conference pointed to Obama's campaign as a watershed, introducing a new era of digital politics. Held in Barcelona, the forum brought together 400 mainly European and American political activists, consultants, journalists, academics and bloggers who shared a strong common interest in capturing the power and potential of Internet to reinforce democracy. In my own presentation, I showed this YouTube video: Founder Andrew Rasiej said technology "is giving power to ordinary people who can organize themselves using new tools like Facebook , Twitter and YouTube in order to have an impact on the political process and to petition governments to be more responsive to their everyday needs,'' he said.Google of course strongly believes in the enabling power of information. Greater transparency and availability of information to the public and the ability for citizens to engage directly in the conversation leads in our view to greater knowledge, democratic accountability & better-informed decision-making. Many of our products - blogger, Gmail, search, YouTube, our translation technologies are designed to allow citizens to do just that - get involved and have their say. We were proud to select 20 innovators as
Google Fellows and pay for their travel and participation at the Barcelona conference.
At the Forum, we also took the opportunity to remind delegates of just what makes the Internet such a unique platform - its openness, low barriers to entry, and a decentralised structure that allows innovation and great ideas to come from any place at any time and for any user to discover these. Fantastic examples of great grassroots projects came from all corners of the Internet globe. One, dubbed mobile micro-volunteering, encouraged computers to spend the empty hours in transit using a smart phone to sending text and images to support small NGO projects. The Personal Democracy Forum just has posted its own interesting
post-mortem . We look forward to learning about more success stories at the next Forum meeting in Europe.
Posted by Susan Pointer, Director, Public Policy & Government Relations,
Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa
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