POINT 2.0 conference | Political Accountability and New Technologies

“Political accountability and new technologies” (POINT) is the theme of a four-day conference held from Thursday the 23rd to Sunday the 26th of May.at Art House Cinema Kriterion in Sarajevo. The conference will gather various experts in the application of new technologies by civil society.

This year’s conference will host numerous guests from around the world who were involved with some of the most influential projects in the field of advocacy, accountability, and transparency. Special focus has been given to speakers from regions of South-East Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Amira Yahyaoui from Tunisian NGO Al Bawsala will hold a presentation on Tunisia – Accountability After Revolution. Amira Yahyaoui has been an activist against Ben Ali’s regime as a member of the Tunisian anti-censorship & freedom of speech movement, she has been banned from the country for 5 years.

POINT 2.0 will also feature a presentation of Morsimeter, an online project for monitoring the fulfillment of election promises of current Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.

Nele Leosk from Estonia will also join POINT. She is active in utilizing new technologies for governance and democratic processes, including e-democracy and e-participation of the public via online tools and SMS messaging.

POINT will also host Gunnar Grímsson and Robert Bjarnason, pioneers in using new technologies in Iceland. They are also founders of Citizen Foundation of Iceland which is active in developing open source platforms for civic participation. In 2011 they were awarded “geeks of the year” in Iceland. Iceland is the first country in the world where citizens were able to give proposals for drafting a new constitution via the internet.

The conference will host numerous civil society organizations from the Balkans that will present the most influential project from BiH, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania, including the Istinomjer (Truth-o-meter) project which monitors fulfillment of election promises and evaluates the factuality of statements given by public officials.

POINT 2.0 will also host a creative workshop for modeling inflatables by Berlin based activist Artur van Balen. On Saturday 25th of May, a public presentation will take place for all inflatables modeled during the workshops.

Complete conference program can be viewed on the official web page: point.zastone.ba.

POINT conference is organized by CA Why not (Zašto ne) from BiH, in  cooperation with Center for Research on Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) from Serbia, Metamorphosis Foundation from Macedonia, Mjaft from Albania and Center for Democratic Transition (CDT) from Montenegro.