On Wednesday, 25 September 2024, 16:00–17:00 CEST, the cities of Amsterdam and Barcelona, leading CC4DR's mission 1, are organizing a mentoring session on methods and practices to overcome challenges faced by cities when organizing participation on digitization topics. 

In an earlier mentoring session, we identified several significant challenges faced by cities (see below). These challenges are very complex, and we only have one hour to discuss the methods and practices to overcome them. Therefore, we would like to organize the next mentoring session a little bit differently. Douwe Schmidt, Public Tech and Ethics expert from the City of Amsterdam, will lead the conversation according to the Socratic Design method. In doing so, we hope to ensure that the session is effective and that we get the most out of it. 

In order to prepare the next session, we would like to ask you to think of any challenges (whether listed below or not) that you would like to discuss during the session. At the beginning of the session, we will determine together with the group which challenge we will focus on during the hour.  

Challenges identified in an earlier mentoring session:

• Inclusivity. For example: how to go beyond engaging the usual suspects?
• Digital accessibility and making information understandable by everyone (including graphs for people who cannot see colors)
• Different approaches and levels of involvement for different topics: how to organize this?
• Lack of financial capacities, staff etc. Especially because of the high number of use-cases that would require participation.
• How to make the outcome of citizen participation really impactful and effective internally within the government?
• How to deal with the fragmentation of public administration with many silos raising a high number of use-cases that would require participation
• Lack of connection between civil servants organizing participation and technical experts in AI
• The timing of the citizen participation: when buying technology, when piloting, continuously? Where to start?
• Defining the participation space very clearly from the beginning and showing impact of citizen's participation.

If you have not received a Teams link to the session yet, please contact Tamilla Abdul-Aliyeva (t.abdulaliyeva@amsterdam.nl). We hope you see you all on the 25th of September!