Setting up a European Citizens’ Initiative might seem challenging at first. However, organisers have online tools and platforms at hand that provide help and facilitate their journey. To better familiarise EU citizens with the available support, the European Citizens’ Initiative Forum is organising an informative webinar on September 15.
The webinar will simulate a user’s journey of initiating a European Citizens’ Initiative and cover the following tools:
(1) the European Citizens’ Initiative website
(2) the central online collection system and
(3) the European Citizens’ Initiative Forum.
In order to make the best possible use of this support infrastructure, the webinar will show case the practical features of the three tools, relevant at different stages of a European Citizens’ Initiative.
Speakers:
Jérôme Stefanini, IT Project Officer, European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT). Jérôme leads the IT team of the European Citizens’ Initiative for the last 4 years. He is responsible for the Commission Central Collection System, the ECI Organiser application and the File Exchange Service. He contributed to the drafting of the new ECI regulation for its IT aspects. Jérôme supports the organisers of European Citizens’ Initiatives and liaises with the different stakeholders (Citizens, Member States, IT providers, Business Owners) to keep the ECI platform close to the users’ needs, performant and evolving.
Adriana-Nicoleta Mungiu-Pătrașcu, Policy Officer in the European Commission’s Secretariat-General, coordinating the communication and guidance activities for the European Citizens’ Initiative. Her objective is to make the European Citizens’ Initiative better known among citizens and empower interested organisations to act as multipliers on the ground. Previously she held several coordinating roles in the area of communication at the EU level and in Romania, dealing with EU enlargement, structural funds and better regulation.
Moderator:
Assya Kavrakova, Executive Director of the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) an international non-profit organization, based in Brussels, with a pan-European membership and nearly 30 years of experience in empowering citizens to exercise their rights since 2014. She has established and guided the development of ECAS’s Digital Democracy focus area, which explores the democratic potential of ICT in reducing the gap between political elites and citizens and transforming the relationship between EU citizens and EU decision-makers into more of a partnership, thus contributing to the creation of an engaged citizenship. Ms Kavrakova has more than twenty years of experience in senior management positions in the non-governmental sector and in-depth knowledge of European Citizenship, European Rights Framework, EU civic participation formal and informal mechanisms. Assya Kavrakova has a Master’s degree in Law and another Master’s degree in European Studies. She is the ECAS project manager of the Forum – the European Citizens’ Initiative online collaborative platform – operated by the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) on behalf of and under contract to the European Commission. She is also a member of the Board of EUobserver – a not-for-profit, independent online newspaper.
Language of webinar: English
Registration
To register, please send an email indicating your first name, surname, and organisation (optional), at the following email address: ECIforum@ecas.org
The webinar will be hosted on the WebEx platform. After sending your email, you will receive the WebEx invitation that will allow you to join the webinar on 15 September.