Summary of the Minutes
From Representative Team meeting
connected with
Training on e-participation and
Joint meeting with PEP-NET
Kunbabony, March 23 - 24, 2009
Present:
Liuba Batembergska – CEGA, Bulgaria; Helmut Hallemaa – The Estonian NGO Roundtable,
Estonia; Chuck Hirt –CCO and CEE CN, Slovakia; Nicu Cuta – CRONO, Romania; Miljenko
Dereta – CI, Serbia; Krzysztof Leonczuk – OWOP, Poland, Malgorzata Makowska – FSLD,
Poland; Dina Manukyan – MILLENNIUM, Armenia, Mate Varga –HACD, Hungary;
Veronika Vodlan – CNVOS, Slovenia; Leonid Kalitenya – CSI, Belarus; Helen Romelashvili
– CIVITAS, Georgia and Anna Karailieva – coordinator of CEE CN.
Agenda of the RT meeting
 CCE Citizens Network - its current activities and new development – general
information from Director of the Network Chuck Hirt
Explanation why we have two RT meeting this year. This is related to two different meetings
with other networks that we are involved with. The first with PEP-NET and the second with
Combined European Bureau for Social Development (CEBSD). We decided that we should
prepare for each of these sessions.
Priorities of our Network are the following:
 CPW – European Week of Local Democracy (EWLD)
 E-participation
 Citizens Participation study
 Relationship with CoE

We developed relations with European groups:
CEBSD
ECON
ALDA
Baltic See Network
It looks that we started to be a really proactive in several areas. It is raising a few other
questions for us:
As we want to be more project oriented, we need to rethink our administrative capacities.
How we are going to manage all new relationships? How will we get resources for some of
our activities like CPW? What to do with our annual training? How we would like to
implement Code of Civil Participation? We have several membership issues – how do we
want to move forward with it?
 Evaluation of the members’ survey and discussion survey outcomes
Anka presented highlights of the answers from 22 members. We agreed that after all members
will send their answers we will send a collection of it as well as summary to everybody. We
will also find a way how to analyze it and implement to the Network operation.

Information about the election process for member of Coordinating Team that
we will hold during our meeting in Sofia
We will have our election in Sofia.

Study on Citizens Participation – discussion on concept paper led by Chuck Hirt
The basic direction is to consider doing mapping citizens’ participation in CEE region but at
the beginning maybe in 3-5 countries. With possibility of EU funding it would be helpful to
have some comparison (e.g. in cooperation with CEBS) with western countries. It is topic for
the afternoon working group.

Citizens Participation Week 2009 and plans for European Week of Local
Democracy – discussion led by Mate Varga, chair person of Citizen Participation
Week
Mate informed everyone about the last edition of CPW. We are keeping a level number of
involved members, forums and quality of activities etc. For sure there is needed some support
at least for PR material but also for human capacities within the Network but also within
members’ organizations. We made a few steps in combining CPW with ELDW.

Training 2009 - information about the PEP-NET project, the meeting with PEP-NET,
training on e-participation and IT agenda from Csaba Madarasz

Development on cooperation with other Networks – CEBSD, Baltic Sea NGO
Network, PEP-NET, ECON, ALDA and possible cooperation with Russian NGO
Network
CEBSD
We should explore together how to cooperate in different levels: local, national, regional,
European.
Baltic See NGO Network
Helmut informed us about the aim, structure and background of the Baltic See NGO Network
as well as about the areas of our possible cooperation which could be exchange of information
and active participation at main events like CPW.
We already talked about ECON. PEP-NET will join us immediately following the training.
ALDA
Exchange and support to each other make sense.
We already cooperate with them on the ALL.4.EU project in the dissemination phase.
They just sent us another invitation for partnership in the project Working Together for
Development. We need to choose the theme for the international workshop.
Russian NGO Network
Chuck mentioned that through his regular meetings at the Council of Europe that he had made
contact with a very interesting group from Russia. The Interlegal Foundation serves as the
support entity for the Citizen Coalition. They are interested in seeking a form of cooperation
with the Citizens Network.
We agreed to sign a memorandum of cooperation with them related to CPW.

Relation with Council of Europe
We can still comment the Code of Civil Participation. Both Chuck and Miljenko had been
invited to two of the consultation sessions. A revised version has been prepared which is
much better and will be approved at the April session of the INGO session. If there are any
further comments that members have regarding this document, there is still a last chance to
influence this. There is also an opportunity to send best practice examples which the Council
of Europe intends to keep updated.
We will develop a way how to connect EWLD with our activities. Chuck and Mate met with
Jos Lemmers in January and had a very encouraging discussion about future cooperation.
Chuck will attend a session in April which will be the first planning session for this year’s
event. There is considerable interest to include more NGO participation and thus shift from
being top down to include more bottom up activity.

Web site – members contributions and using the blog – instructions from web site
manager Csaba Madarasz
We agreed that members will check and also contribute to the web site.

Best Practice database – how to move forward
We can contribute to the European database of best practices that CoE is collecting. They
have format how to do it so we can move to the higher level and not to do it any more in
level of CEE CN. In this way we can promote our Network on European level. Maybe we
can transform our existing best practices to their format and send it there.

Conference on Participatory Rural Development – information from the organizers
representative Nicu Cuta
Nicu informed us about the Conference and its workshops.

Discussion on the 2009 work plan – This item will be considered at the Sofia
meeting.

Small groups discussion on the three topics:
1.
CPW/EWLD
Mate Varga chaired this group. His main goal was to hear members experience and ideas
related to the CPW and common ideas (brainstorm) how to better link CPW-EWLD.
It was also important to know better what kind of help or cooperation or assistance would
members need from the Network for better implementation of CPW activities.
2.
IT agenda
Csaba Madarasz discussed this issue with RT members during the training that he led next
day.
3.
CP study
Chuck Hirt chaired this group. The group focused much of its time discussing how to define
what we want to look at when we say citizen participation. This will be a major challenge in
conducting the study. A number of questions emerged.
 Will we consider only decision making or implementation as well?
 Will the study focus on local level or national level involvement?
 Do we look at voter participation at all levels?
 Will there be a uniform approach?
 What are the tools we will use to measure?
There was a suggestion to consider a pilot study in one country to develop a questionnaire that
could then be used in other countries.
The group suggested several people who could possibly serve on the Steering Committee
including people from Serbia, Bulgaria.
There was a suggestion that we might want to consider this study in relation to the 2011 EU
year of Volunteerism.

Other
We got the request from Gleb to write some support letters from our member organizations
for his work on rural development in Archangelsk.

E-participation agenda
At the conclusion of the training event the following day, there was a discussion about ideas
to the next two years related to our e-participation strategy. The following ideas were
mentioned:

Document the current situation in our region

Start our activities with ourselves – e.g. start using the blog more regularly, wiki and
on-line activities

Connect these events with CP Week including possible tools such as Facebook and/or
Twitter.

Support several bottom up projects

Lobby with EU so that there will be increased support for more bottom up activities
rather than only government oriented.
These too will be finalized at the May meeting.