What problem are you solving?:

Before every elections there are lots of promises given to citizenry. Politicians and other “public people” tell what needs to be changed in different areas around us; what are their plans for the nearest couple of years.

Unfortunately, it is very complicated to keep track on their promises: where they kept word given, what was completed only partly and what was done exactly vice-verca compared to the promised. On the other hand, competing political movements try to play with promises of each other with aim to confuse electorate, but there should be way how to check who talks what.

Describe your idea:

Promismeter – is an interactive web-site we would like to build, based on modern Web2.0 and social networking technologies. Web-site allows everyone to create profiles of every public person, political figures and parties.

Once created, other users may fill-in those profiles with links to blogs, newspapers and other media, that posted promises of this particular person or party. Promises can be classified, commented and rated.

Later (for example after 1-6 month since promise was made), everyone may asses it and tell his opinion if this promise was fulfilled or no. Again, posting links to media sources that explain situation are welcomed.

It will help all people to keep track on promises made by politicians and will potentially hold them from throwing mere words.

What country will this operate in?: Estonia

Who are you?:

We are a small team of individuals with strong competences in different areas: software development and e-commerce, marketing and sales, information processing and data analysis. We are open-minded and have active social position, but don’t belong to any of Estonian political parties.

We are running some internet commercial start-ups, and aimed to contribute into development of a new-age democracy in our country by means of modern Internet technologies.

What problem are you solving?:

Estonia has one of the lowest levels of overall political involvement among young persons in Europe (EU Youth Report, 2009). This is concerning in terms of raising future leaders and democratic empowerment. Youth’s political alienation is worrying from the aspect of social cohesion and development.
Estonian youth’s motivation to participate and interest in politics is present but the attractive form of political participation for young people is absent. The increasingly populist election campaigns, signs of non-transparent and non-participatory practice of public policy-making contribute to young citizens’ alienation of politics. The conventional practice of mass media is to report on politicians selectively and without constant tracking of their political behavior which diffuses accountability and transparency in public policy making. Missing dialogue between the politicians and citizens creates the communication divide resulting in a gap between those “two worlds”.

Describe your idea:

The attractive, dynamic and informative web environment is created/maintained by youth to function as a platform for dialogue while observing the actions of politicians and interacting with them.

As the use of ICT is natural for young Estonians, the innovative web-community is easily accessible and allows creative solutions for posting ideas in various forms of multimedia, including text, still images, audio, animation, simulation, video content forms. It allows micro-blogging, while conveying policy-making as an excitingly challenging process.

The Eye on Politics (EP) includes: chronological profiles of Parliament representatives; info on political views, ethics and policy making procedures; modules enabling interaction between the youth and politicians.

The Eye on Politics empowers democracy by interactive new form of democracy in Estonia; increased accountability through collective political memory and advanced feeling of inclusion and trust towards policy-making.

What country will this operate in?: Estonia

Who are you?:

PRAXIS Center for Policy Studies was founded in 2000 as the first independent non-profit think tank in Estonia. Initiative to found PRAXIS came from Open Society Institute which is run by George Soros.

The mission of PRAXIS is to improve and contribute to the policy-making process in Estonia by conducting independent research, providing strategic counsel to policy makers and fostering public debate.

PRAXIS has been active in general public policy areas, such as governance and participation. Recent research topics include measuring the actual improvement of the strategic role of civil society; measuring the improvement of the fiscal and legal environment for non-governmental organizations; analyzing the application of The Good Engagement Practices; training stakeholders’ analytic capacity and enhancing the quality of stakeholder consultation; developing regulatory impact assessment.

What problem are you solving?:

Nowadays still majority of decisions are originated by government and ministries. Only in certain cases (like changes in Constitution), when a voice of every citizen is important, government conducts referendums. This is a slow process where an ordinary citizen has no influence upon a topic of voting. Citizenry has very limited possibilities to initiate a public discussion around national-wide problems and can’t provide government with their consolidated opinion about on the topic in an efficient and reliable manner. Typically, initiators collect signatures of other people (on paper or as list of e-mail addresses) for supporting some idea and bring them to the government. The amount of signatures (or e-mail addresses) gathered should tell how considerable the named problem is. Unfortunately, this is extremely inefficient way, as it is impossible to trust nor to validate gathered data, as well as to draw a social-demographic portrait of people, who either supported or rejected an idea.

Describe your idea:

We see the solution as a website, where any citizen can rise his/hers idea to a public voting. The key difference of our solution from similar approaches is that Private Electronic Identity will be used for voting (in Estonia there is personal identity card, or ID-card). It ensures that every person has only one legitimate voice to support or reject an idea. Moreover, using ID-card provides information about personality of its owner: sex and age of the person and can optionally be expanded with additional information, like occupation, place of residence, level of income, etc. What is important, the name of the person remains anonymous. Metadata will help to reveal the actual mood trends, as well as to understand, what are the actual problems citizens are worried about. Voting results and social-demographic details will be free available through this website to all people interested in a true transparent democracy and will support dialog between government and people.

What country will this operate in?: Estonia

Who are you?:

We are a small team of individuals with strong competences in different areas: software development and e-commerce, marketing and sales, information processing and data analysis. We are open-minded and have active social position, but don’t belong to any of Estonian political parties.

We are running some internet commercial start-ups, and aimed to contribute into development of a new-age democracy in our country by means of modern Internet technologies.