re:publica 2014 - Civic Tech -- of the people, by the pe...

What if governments invited citizens to help create new tools and services that fit their needs? What if citizens offered governments not only their voices but also their hands and help build tools that improve the communication and collaboration between citizens and public administration? Initiatives and city labs around the world demonstrate how such engagement translates into new forms of citizen participation through the use of new technology. What´s behind these new initiatives and city labs? What challenges do they face and what chances do they hold?

Stefan Kaufmann

Julia Kloiber

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany
(CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

[skreutzer]

3:58 I find it totally bewildering that civic tech is almost always seen and presented from the perspective of the government or the framework of the city administration.

6:43 No, that's a hard fact, because taxes are taken from people regardless of what they want to get for them in return. If government would be a platform, there would be no need for a government whatsoever. Government is based on the monopoly of power and those in power don't want to let it go -- with a platform, there can be many providers and platforms for achieving the goals in question.

10:42 I don't understand why it necessarily has to come down to collaboration with the government. The government doesn't define what the interest of the public is. Sometimes the interest of the government is contrary to the interest of the public, and sometimes the government doesn't want to open up and be transparent for various reasons.

12:54 No, a lot of interaction should take place between engaged citizens directly.

14:01 I find it really hard to find their solutions and learn about them. I'm totally unable to comprehend why they don't have a link to their GitHub organization on their front page.

28:51 Yes, I get it, communities are local, therefore the services need to be localized. Also, meetings in person make a lot of sense to get stuff done. On the other hand: I don't code for Germany alone but for everybody. I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.