Consul Conference 2025: Gran Canaria

CONSULCON25

The Consul Democracy Foundation in collaboration with the Cabildo de Gran Canaria organises the next ConsulCon on 4-6 February 2025 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The conference celebrates the 10-year anniversary of the open source project Consul Democracy and brings the project back to where it all started, Spain.

From 2015 onwards the Consul Democracy citizen participation platform has spread across the globe to countries as diverse as Brasil, Mexico, Scotland, Germany, Romania and, more recently, Somalia and the Maldives.

The ConsulCon2025 in Gran Canaria will be a moment to reflect and take stock, but most of all a moment to connect an ever-developing community, exchange views and knowledge, and take a collective look forward into the near future.

So please save the date for an awesome three-day event on Consul Democracy, participatory democracy, open source technology and more! Expect demo runs, workshops on devising participation  processes, sessions about open source technology and keynotes about the  democratic potential of it all.
 
When: 4 February 15:00 – 6 February 20:00 2025
Where: Alfredo Kraus Auditorium / Infecar Feria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria
Programme: final programme will be announced in November at the latest.
Tickets: Tickets for the three-day event are 100 euros. For small organizations with limited resources we make exceptions and have available a donation-based ticket.

Keynote speakers:

• Carla Bezerra. Throughout her career, Carla worked both as a practitioner and as a scholar, with a consistent focus on democracy, participation, and civil society. Currently, she works as the Director of Digital Participation and Network Communication at the General Secretariat of the Brazilian Presidency of the Republic, where she is responsible for the Brasil Participativo Platform. Since 2011, she has been a specialist in public policy and government management within the Brazilian federal civil service.

• Joan Subirats is a long time thinker on the intersection of technology and politics and politcal advisor to Spanish and Catalunyan progressive political parties and government administrations.

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What we’ll do

ConsulCon25 brings together experts and practitioners in the field of (digital) citizen participation to exchange experiences, discuss best practices, and explore new developments in the field. The conference will gather platform users and partners from various cities and regions to explore the opportunities and challenges of digital forms of democratic decision-making in general.

We will ask questions like: what can we learn from current and former citizen participation use cases? What best practices exist, both on the technology side as on the government administration side? But also: How can we create better open source software collaboratively and how do we make Consul Democracy a genuine collective project? And: what are the ways in which Consul and its users may counter current global authoritarian trends?

Call for proposals

For the ConsulCon25 we are calling on our community and networks to cocreate the conference programme. We cordially invite government officials, civil society organizations, open source developer teams and other related stakeholders of the Consul Democracy project to propose a session in one of the following categories:

• Dem talk (1 hour)
• Tech talk (1 hour)
• Panel exchange (1,5 hour)
• Workshop (1,5 hour)

During the conference we have room for 6 panel exchanges and workshop and 6 lightning and tech talks. We appreciate event formats of a participatory nature.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 14 October 2024.

Examples of topics and themes we are interested in:

• A Workshop on how to devise a process of citizen participation
• A Panel exchange about participatory democracy case studies
• A Dem talk about (recent) histories of direct/participatory democracy
• A Tech talk about (the importance of) open source technology, especially for marginalized communities
• A Workshop on how to install and/or modify the Consul software yourself
• A Dem talk about the challenge of citizen participation inclusiveness
• A Panel exchange on the relation between participatory democracy, public trust and the rise of authoritarianism and extremism
• A Tech talk about new relevant advances in technology for citizen participation platforms such as AI
• A Dem Talk about political leadership and bureaucratic activism

How to send in your proposal

Please fill in the form below.