"Smart Citizenship" meets again in Cascais

The Municipality of Cascais and the New School of Business and Economics in Portugal will hold, for the second consecutive year, the Smart Citizenship Academy, a space for reflection, debate and co-creation on more intense ways of living democracy and citizen participation.
This year's edition of the Academy has the contributions of a network of international partners, including the World Bank (Moscow, Russian Federation), the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (Washington, United States of America), the Association of Municipalities and Regions of Sweden (Stockholm, Sweden) and the International Observatory for Participatory Democracy (Barcelona, Spain).
In accordance with the last edition, the program provides four days of presentations, debates and group work, which will bring to Cascais some of the most prestigious national and international names in the issues at hand.
The first day will focus on the crisis of democracies, which led the organization to invite some experts who will help to understand phenomena such as populism, use of the vote as a "weapon" of retaliation against more traditional political elites, as well as the troubled process of Brexit.
The morning of the second day will be dedicated to understanding the potentialities and threats of the new forms of artificial intelligence for democracy, a very current subject and on which there are no certainties nor consensus.
The afternoon of this day will allow participants to opt for two working groups, namely: a) socially inclusive participatory processes, with presentations of practices that have developed specific mechanisms to enhance the involvement of social groups traditionally further from decision-making centres; b) transparency, digital government and citizens' participation in fiscal dynamics at the national level, with some of the best known international practices being presented.
The morning of the third day will be dedicated to the first-hand public presentation of the Participatory Budgeting World Atlas, an ongoing project involving a vast international network of collaborators. The results will be debated by a panel of guests from four continents.
The afternoon of the third day will bring two new working groups, namely: a) the institutionalization of participatory budgeting - threats and potentialities, with the participation of countries such as Peru and Poland, with legislations dedicated to this topic; b) participation mechanisms by sampling, focused on the presentation of experiences that favour mini-groups or representative methods, as an alternative to initiatives of a universal character, with the invitation of the Government of South Korea to present its experience of the National Participatory Budgeting and the Municipality of Madrid to share the work around the recently created observatory of the city.
The fourth and last day will be dedicated to youth participation, with the presentation of highly emblematic initiatives that demonstrate the relevance and timeliness of social and political actions promoted by the young.
Given the characteristics and objectives of the event, the organization decided to open a limited number of places, namely fifty, which are filled by order of registration. Registrations are open at the following address.
The Academy is an initiative supported by the Oficina.