Component 4 seminar and staff exchange
14 - 16 September 2010 in Tampere, Finland
Component 4 meeting in the BIF
City of Tampere as the responsible partner of the eCitizen II project Component 4 arranged a seminar and staff exchange to introduce Valma – an eParticipation forum enabling citizens to participate in the city council decision-making. Representatives of three project partners, Province of Flevoland, Vysocina region and Kerry County Council, attended the event to learn about good practices and lessons learnt of Valma to be applied for citizen involvement in their local environments.
Local Democracy Unit of Tampere together with city information and cultural affairs officials gave an overview as well as practical experiences of applying Valma into every-day work. Head of city decision-making Ms. Ritva Salisma introduced the decision-making process in the City of Tampere and practical examples of utilizing Valma city council work.
On Wednesday 15 September 2010 Internet-based public services targeting at youth and elderly citizens were introduced for the seminar participants. Netari.fi project (http://www.netari.fi/web/guest/english) aims at providing services for young over the Internet as well as creating a coherent work model and working culture for Internet youth work in Finland. Netari online youth work is performed in two network environments, Habbo and IRC-Galleria, making it possible for young people to have real-time conversations both with other youths and with trained youth work professionals.
Project designer Mia Vaelma introduced T-Seniority project and it’s Finnish pilot SeniorLine for the seminar participants. SeiniorLine is designed to providing reliable, combined community home and health care services to senior citizens and to support their socially rich, independent living at home. The offered services are based on interactive communication means using video and voice.
http://tseniority.idieikon.com/index.php/lang-en
On 16 September 2010 a half-day session was devoted to discussion on utilizing social media in providing opportunities for citizens to have online and interactive access to public services. Ms. Anna-Maria Maunu, head of communications unit of Tampere gave an overview of the city strategy for using and utilizing social media in the every day work. Practical level case examples of social media applications in facebook and Twitter were intruduced by city museum and immigrant services.
The seminar was closed with an introduction of the latest develoments and future demands for the on-line library and web-services of Tampere.
