Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out:

Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to the general public by way of aggregating, enhancing and presenting government information from various sources from the “Ratsinformationssystem” (city council information system), the official platform of the City of Cologne.

Open Cologne appears to have been inspired by Frankfurt Gestalten, whose creator Christian Kreutz I interviewed a while back.

I usually refrain from embedding other people’s hard work unless I have at least some additional value to add. In this case, however, I’m simply glad to see my German hometown embrace public participation:

About Zebralog:

Zebralog is a not-for-profit organization that supports modern democratic decision making through the use of interactive media. Zebralog offers every service that is needed to run online dialogues: institutional embedding, marketing, technical backbone and moderation. Its members have a strong background in participatory planning processes, social science and face-to-face moderation. In Germany, they were among the first to conduct online consultations for various state bodies, among them the government of Berlin or Frankfurt.

Zebralog has also offered consulting and research to organizations that plan to stage online dialogues, among them the Federal Parliament of Germany and the Federal Ministry for Development. Last but not least, the members of Zebralog are very engaged in networking activities to exchange experience among dialogue designers, make the opportunity of e-participation more known and work towards standards of excellence. Currently, Zebralog directs its creativity to the challenge of transnational and multi-lingual online dialogues and is very interested to find international partners for cooperation.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this presentation was held at a conference in China: International Conference “Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe: Key Challenges of Participation”, August 17-19, 2009, University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China