SDDP Reinventing Democracy - Vision
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Executive Summary
This paper reports the results of the first of a series of workshops organized by Future Worlds Center under the auspices of the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the EU. The dialogue was implemented in the context of the Reinventing democracy (YiA 1.3) project. The purpose of this project was to bring together young people from Greece and Cyprus in an attempt to take apart and reconstruct the concept of democracy, an EU founding principle. The workshop was organized using the structured dialogic design process (SDDP) approach within the context of a rich web-based communication environment.
The Triggering Question (TQ) was
How could we re-design modern society by envisioning a New Democracy?
In response to the TQ, the 22 participants came up with 125 characteristics, which were categorized in 21 clusters. Following the voting process, 49 ideas received one or more votes and were structured to create the influence MAP shown below.
According to the participants of this workshop, the characteristics appear to be the most influential were:
- Characteristic #34, The Laws are voted directly by people
- Characteristic #19, Inclusiveness, dialogue, co-decision in local communities and their representation in decision-making.
The workshop was facilitated by Yiannis Laouris, Eleni Michail, Elia Petridou, Irini Anastassiou, Maria Georgiou, and Soteris Demetriou. The workshop was attended by 11 Cypriots participants and 11 Greek participants.
In sum, the participants of the dialogue reported their satisfaction that their voices have been heard and documented and communicated their expectations for follow-up activities to address the diagnosis of their needs.
Sponsor and partners
The workshop was funded under the Action 1.3 - Youth Democracy Projects of the Youth in Action Programme of the European Commission and was supported by Agoras Cyprus presidency. The event was organized by Future Worlds Center in collaboration with ANTIGONE (Greece), UOP-ELKE (Greece) and YEU (Cyprus).
