Crowdpolicy PCC, having successfully launched and supported Vouliwatch.gr in Greece, is proud to announce the deployment of Open Parliament Cyprus (OPC), an Open Innovation platform for Cyprus.
OPC is an initiative of Makewaves, a Cyprus based NGO, and is supported in its efforts by the Greek Parliament Watch Platform (Vouliwatch.gr) and CrowdPolicy, as the strategic Technology and Innovation Partner. The project has received a grant by the Erasmus+ program and the first kick-off meeting is scheduled for November.
The purpose of OPC is to promote public dialogue, to enhance accountability and transparency in politics and to empower the participation of young cypriots in politics. The rationale is to tackle the dissatisfaction with politics, the mistrust in institutions and politicians and the falling interest in politics.
The main features of the upcoming state-of-the-art OPC web-based platform will be:
- Public questioning feature (“Ask your Member of Parliament | MP ” / or Member of European Parliament | MEP): In a moderated platform, citizens shall be able to ask questions and receive public replies by MP’s and MEP’s.
- Votewatch feature: This application shall allow users to keep an eye on the voting behavior of each MP while informing the public on the details and background information of each legislation put forward for voting.
- “Crowdsourcing legislation” and parliamentary control feature (“Share ideas, experiences and make proposals”): Citizens will be able to publicize their experiences, ideas or proposals either at a national and international level. The community of users will be able to provide comments and even rate these opinions.
- “Policy Monitor” feature (“compare party positions”): The Policy Monitor is a digital tool which allows the platform users to learn about and compare what the main political parties’ positions are on given issues. It will also give them the opportunity to comment on these positions and suggest to political parties different approaches.
- “Open Data” feature: In the OPC platform, certain data such as: the number of questions and answers by civilians and MPs/MEPs, the type and number of parliament debates on issues raised within the platform, statistics regarding the questions and answers response rate, the different policies sectors, etc. shall be freely available to everyone to use and republish.
Furthermore, additional innovative aspects of the OPC platform are the integration and joint actions of similar international or local web based platforms, the active participate of civilians in debates etc. The development of the platform will be based on the Crowd Innovation Toolkit, developed by Crowdpolicy to support Private and Public Sector organizations.
In the context of this new initiative the Co-Founder & CTO/CIO of Crowdpolicy George Karamanolis stated:
“Having a robust experience in crowdsourcing, we are excited to participate in the OPC initiative by providing our expertise in advanced ICT solutions and consulting for open innovation. Furthermore, driven by our mission to bridge the gap between organizations and the crowd, we would like to invite all parties interested in the development of similar platforms (full platform or specific modules) in other countries/cities to contact us for further details and support.”
Crowdpolicy Company Profile
Crowdpolicy PCC was founded in 2012 in Athens and is active in the consultation, design and development of innovative solutions for the Private and Public sectors by utilizing crowdsourcing methods and techniques. Since 2012, Crowdpolicy has successfully accomplished more than 100 complex projects. A recent example is synathina platform for Municipality of Athens; Synathina is a crowdsourcing platform for groups working on projects to improve life and services in the city of Athens. (www.synathina.gr). Crowdpolicy has developed the concept that has been awarded 1m euros as a Winner in “Bloomberg Mayors Challenge 2014” (http://goo.gl/rBuovx). Additionally, Company’s founders have also lead large-scale open government and transparency projects for the Greek public sector (https://diavgeia.gov.gr/en, http://www.opengov.gr/en/ and other initiatives described at http://ogp.opengov.gr/ ). The company’s services can be summarized as follows: Open and Digital Innovation Actions Coordination, Crowdhackathons, Project Management Applications and Services through Crowdsourcing Techniques and Methodologies (PM Engine), Creation of added value services concerning organizations’ data (Opendata | Enrichment | APIs Creation), Community Building (Citylabs | Innovation hubs), Business Consulting for Funded Projects.
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