I attended a conference organised by democracy international called building bridges. It was held in Berlin in the year of the 35th anniversary of the fall of the wall. The conference was partly EU funded and therefore preference was given to attendees from certain countries, including Poland, from where a school class had decided to visit bringing a large number of young people.
We learned that the Berlin Government has an ambassador to its own immigrant community and that 40% of Berlin’s residents have a migrant background. The admirable ambition to welcome migrants with dignity and hope is imbedded in Berlin’s open door Act. This was a remarkable presentation showing what can be done when a Government wants to do the right thing. The speakers were invited because of the meme, that “Borders are Walls”, and if anywhere, the bad effects of a wall can be seen it is or was Berlin,
The https://www.democracy.community/stories/bujaru-citizens-assembly was mentioned, and my notes say that while there are many tools, democracy is an eco-system and the problem studied should be defined bottom up.
We reviewed the current list of ECI’s in progress which included the “Stop Destroying Video Games”; we reviewed the outcome and response to the “end the cage age” petition which at the time was being reviewed by the CJEU.
The conference was to break into two work shops, one on environmental change and the other on democracy by petition. I was in a syndicate group that looked at developing an ECI to save people from floods this was in response to the Spanish flooding which had occurred recently.
We briefly reviewed the tools used to weaken bottom up democracy, most counter intuitively referendums, which because they can only have one winner, can create massive and often several minorities.
These notes were made a year later and backdated to the date of occurrence. The featured image is one of mine, rendered by AI.