June 12, 2024
Longer description:
With the “Forum against Fakes” (https://forum-gegen-fakes.de/de/englisch), which was launched on 24 January this year, the Bertelsmann Stiftung, in cooperation with the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and other partners, is holding a nationwide debate on how politics and society should deal with the issue of disinformation and the social problems associated with it.
Through a layered process, which combines different stages of online consultation with several sessions of a citizens’ assembly, the project fulfils different purposes: The online consultation and intensive campaigning launched a national debate and prepared the ground for a citizens’ assembly. The Citizens’ Assembly produced in-depth and concrete proposals to be taken up by the Ministry of the Interior. And through the interaction of a citizens’ assembly with an online consultation, a continuous feedback loop was created, informing the wider online community as well as the citizens participating in the assembly.
In this session, Dominik and Stefan will to share the experience of setting up such a complex, multi-stage, simultaneous online and offline process, and the lessons learned from its implementation. They will show how they set up this process with the deliberate aim of combining the strengths of online consultations and citizen assemblies, and what they have learnt from implementing it with a variety of partners and service providers. In particular, they will focus on the challenges of combining two seemingly diametrically opposed participation processes in a logical and fruitful way.