National Workshop – Poland 08.11.2022
On November 8, 2022, workshops on e-participation for young people and representatives of the Starachowice Commune and Starachowice County were held, implemented as part of the “Digital Civic Participation 2.0” project, financed by the EU Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values 2021-2027 Program (CERV).
The aim of the workshop was to increase knowledge on the use of e-participation tools and concepts in everyday activities and to identify local problems and joint search for solutions, including analyzing and monitoring existing methods and tools used in e-participation.
The meeting with young people took place at the Senator Hotel and began with a short presentation on social participation. In order to introduce the participants to the topic, the participation ladder, exemplary methods of social consultations, the idea of participatory budget and tools supporting social participation in both traditional and electronic form were presented. Then the participants went to the next stage, which allowed them to understand in practice the idea of social participation, i.e. searching for problems and solutions. A simplified design thinking method was used for this, consisting of the following parts: discovering, defining a challenge, creating a solution, prototyping and planning implementation. The first step was to diagnose the problems and needs, i.e. the stage where social participation plays an extremely important role. Participants created profiles of people in need of help and struggling with various problems, e.g. disability, difficult social situation (single parenting), alienation, problems with public transport, lack of places to spend free time or low salary – while learning practical ways to reach residents . Participants were divided into 4 groups, in which they worked on solving problems of people they had invented. By working on specific examples, young people had the opportunity to create suggestions for solutions and try to describe what should be done so that others learn about the needs of a given person. In practice, young people could see what impact social participation can have on residents – for example, through social consultations, you can learn about their problems, on the basis of which specific solutions can be proposed, e.g. by means of the participatory budget.
Workshops with representatives of local government units began with diagnosing where we encounter participation in the structures of public institutions and in what form. It was unanimously recognized that, regardless of the tasks performed, everyone has some contact with the simplest participatory activities, such as surveys or public consultations. A general discussion began among the gathered participants concerning the particularly important role played by participation, its methods and emerging barriers. These barriers appear both on the part of the local community and public authorities and relate to e.g. to mutual distrust, reluctance to cooperate, and fear of change.
After the theory, it was time for practice, during which the participants were divided into groups. Each group had to answer 7 questions concerning participatory activities in the city of Starachowice. The questions focused on how information about the intention to conduct, for example, consultations was disseminated, who participated in them, what were their effects and what were the most common problems. During the joint discussion of the exercise, the topic of e-participation and ideas for its use emerged. An example of the nationwide use of e-participation was the website PomocmyTo. It is a service that allows its users to report problems observed in their immediate environment. The basic function of the service is to report various types of problems in public space, inform relevant institutions about these problems, browse and search for alerts from the nearest area. At the very end, a discussion was started on the use of e-participation in Starachowice. Is it used at all? If so, how? The workshop ended, leaving the participants with a reflection on how to improve and increase the scope of using e-participation activities in Starachowice.
The workshop was attended by 30 people – apart from the employees of the Municipal Office and the District Office, representatives of the Municipal Public Library, Park of Culture, Social Services Center and the Municipal Sports and Recreation Center took part.
