An Electronic Town Meeting In Tuscany Recommends Law  Enabling Citizen Deliberations

Inspired by AmericaSpeaks, a 21st Century Town Meeting  was held in Tuscany, Italy late last year and a consensus emerged that would have public deliberations mandated by law on any issue regarding public governance and particularly for disputes about high impact projects and unwanted facilities .

By Iolanda Romano, Avventura Urbana

An Electronic Town Meeting was convened in Tuscany, Italy in late November, 2006 to focus on the issue of what should be the content of a regional law that would mandate a whole new range of citizen participation in governance.  This was the first of its kind, but followed two citizen jury experiments in Milan and Turin this past summer. (See article By Lyn Carson on this in JPD Volume II (2006) at www.services.bepress.com/jpd/vol2/iss1/art12 )

Approximately 500 citizens attended the event. Of these, only 30 were randomly selected although other methods were used to attempt to make the assemblage representative of the population of the region.  What emerged was a strong consensus that the results of these kinds of citizen dialogues and deliberations should be binding on such matters as to who should sponsor such events and get regional funding, just the government or local civic groups.  The answer was: both!

Another agreement reached via this process was whether the issues that should be discussed in these public deliberations should be delimited by the law, or whether any kind of issue was open to such citizen discussions.  The answer: No limitation on the subject matter.

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