The Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) is conducting an online participation process within the state association together with the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland Landesverband Nordrhein-Westfalen e.V. (BUND NRW e.V.). The regional and district executive committees of BUND NRW, the respective executive committees of the BUND NRW Youth as well as the spokespersons of the regional working groups are involved.
Within the framework of the participation process, ideas are to be collected and discussed in order to make the commitment in and for BUND NRW e.V. even more attractive for the members and outsiders. The DIID provides the technical platform and takes over the scientific monitoring and evaluation.
The participation platform is based on the “Adhocracy” software. The platform offers different levels of participation, ranging from formulating one’s own suggestions to commenting on the contributions of others and evaluating comments or suggestions. The participation process will start at the end of June and will enable the target group to exchange ideas in three thematic forums over a period of around four weeks and to develop joint proposals that will then be discussed more broadly within the association.
Following the participation process, the DIID will evaluate the process. An online survey will be conducted for this purpose. Within the framework of an evaluation of objectives, it will be analyzed whether the objectives associated with the participation and formulated by the initiators have been achieved. In addition, the evaluation will include an assessment of the specific participation process and a general evaluation of the possibilities for using online participation in BUND NRW.
Contact
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tobias Escher
Board, Computer Science, Political Science, Sociology
Tobias Escher leads a BMBF-funded junior research group investigating the effects of participation processes on the quality and legitimacy of political decisions, especially in the context of the transformation to sustainable mobility in the local context. Previously, he supervised the DIID as well as the NRW Forschungskolleg Online-Partizipation at the HHU-Düsseldorf as scientific coordinator. He is a social scientist and holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He can also draw on his basic knowledge of computer science when assessing the possibilities and limits of digitization.
His research focuses on the evaluation of political participation online and offline. In particular, he addresses the question of the extent to which citizen participation contributes to higher quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has developed a teaching module on the theory and practice of online participation, from which, among other things, a project on student participation in teaching has emerged.
Photographer: ©Tilman Schenk
Projects
Contact
Dr. Katharina Gerl
Political Science
Dr. Katharina Gerl has been a research assistant at DIID at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2016. She studied Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and Political Communication (M.A.) at HHU-Düsseldorf. For her dissertation at the Chair of Political Science II at Heinrich Heine University, she studied the impact of digital media on political parties as organizations.
Her research interests lie in the areas of effects and acceptance of digital democratic innovations in politics and administration as well as of artificial intelligence for political opinion-forming and decision-making.