Since April 1st we have a new instrument for political participation in the EU – the European Citizen Initiative (ECI). EU citizen can propose new laws and regulations towards the European Commission and with the right amount of votes they get an public hearing and the guarantee that the EU politicans have to work on this initiative.
In theory you can start a new initiative with 7 citizens from 7 different EU countries and after registration you can start collecting votes. Unfortunately people do not have the technical know how or the financial resources to set up an Online Voting System that is needed to collect votes that are valid for an ECI initiative.
openPetition demands a central and public Online Voting System that is accessible to each EU citizen. To achive this goal openPetition has started an initiative with the following objective:
Title: Central public online collection platform for the European Citizen Initiative
Objectives:
Provide an online Europeean Initiatives Platform where you can register new initiatives and collect signatures at the same time.
Show an overview of all initiatives which can be broken down by topic, country and polularity.
Allow originators of an initiative to get in contact with their suppoerters and allow all citizens to discuss and argure each of the decisions.
Show transparrently at which state each of the initatives are and who is in charge of the next step until the final deciscion on that topic has been made.
Reason:
Why should everyone put in the effort of hosting its one online collection tool when you can have a single one for all of us?
Providing an open source collection software is great but only half the way. If we want to enable European Citizens to participate in the European politics then we have to provide a low barrier tool which works instantly and without technical expertise.
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Update: 7 Citizens have been found from Austria, France, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia and Luxembourg.