Tallinn’s Open Government Partnership Global Summit

Last week Voca was represented at the OGP Global Summit in Tallinn for the first time. Here are our key takeaways.

Estonia’s Civic Tech Landscape

Estonia’s path to increase citizen participation is built through digital tools such as the Estonian Cooperation Assembly: Rahvaalgatus.ee which has managed to become an official and legal mechanism for citizens to get their proposals reviewed by the Estonian Parliament and has since then been scaling towards wider adoption by the population.

Meeting with PeoplePowered

We had the pleasure of meeting with PeoplePowered: We were already familiarized with their incredible work worldwide, but we discovered an inspiring initiative in Central Eastern Europe led by Participation Factory, which showcases how to build solid and engaging continuous cycles of participation.

Collaborating with Afro-leadership

Voca has entered into a partnership with Afro-leadership for the distribution of Voca in Africa but we have not had the chance to meet in person yet. It was a pleasure to spend some face-to-face time with our partner Charlie from Afro-leadership and discuss some opportunities for participatory democracy in Africa.

How about Ukraine?

We were very impressed by the work the Ukrainian government has been doing on digitizing the state amidst the ongoing conflict. The DiiA App puts Ukraine on a path of open and transparent government placing their citizens and public services at the center of it. We were happy to see that the Swiss Development Cooperation was a key funding partner of DiiA and we hope that they will want to push civic techs such as Decidim with Voca to the people that need them the most.

…And we went to a Democracy Sauna!

Finally, thank you to the DD Foundation for this great Democracy Sauna. Good luck with the launch of the Coalition in the Baltic Region, we hope we can bring it to Switzerland one day!

— Guillaume for Voca