At least according to Alejandro la Phillippe, one of the participants of the Personal Democracy Europe Forum. PDF was held in Barcelona for the last two days and is all about the influence of technology on Politics and Civic Movements.

Of course the 1%CLUB needed to be there. Some central questions of the conference were: how to use the new media to organize successful political and civic movements and how to successfully apply the new technologies and social media to bring about change. As it turned out:  the most successful campaigns that mobilized thousands of people were a-political.   A future were people would be far more likely to  involve in specific causes instead of political movements or ideologies was also underlined by Jeremy Heimans (Getup.org) representative as well as Andrew Banks from Purpose, a social enterprise that builds movements to help solve major global problems. In addition,  David Babbs from 38degrees.org provided a nice overview of the things that are likely to make your campaign effective:

Alejandro’s conclusion makes sense: Whenever you present an issue form a political  party’s  point of view, you can’t prevent form dragging all this other issues and interest (and ego’s) into it. The suspicion might rise that a politician don’t want to have clean parks just for the sake of clean parks…

Because of all the other interests involved, EU is also not a strong  mobilizer of its citizens to evoke true change. So many people, sponsors et cetera need to be mentioned on every platforms that it is hard to discover the essence of many of the EU portals, let alone get enthusiastic about it. A solution to that could be to empower the groups that are already working on important issues and simply let them do their thing… What of course is kind of scary.

Bottemline; we get passionate about specific  targeted goals. We don’t get passionate about abstract and vague policies and processes. Not in a positive sense anyway.

Another big issue during the PDF was of course the call for open data. Alec Rose actually started the conference  by showing that  this call isn’t actually anything new. The tension between the choice to be an open or close society goes back at least 2300 years. Even though open societies are far more likely to experience prosperity and progress, there will always be forces that want to close up our societies again. So true…

So all the 1%CLUB participants, keep up your good work! By participating in the 1%CLUB network, you do more that support projects. You are also changing the course of the history!

As for the PDF: thanks for the  Google Fellowship that allowed me to attend this amazing conference. I’m going home with a better understanding of what works and what not. Looking forward to attend the June conference in New York!

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