When I visited Cebit this year, I found Code N, a hall dedicated to young start ups, the most interesting place. Among apps to intelligently plan when to refill your electric car or how to organize car sharing more easy, a stand from India caught my attention. The movement CorruptionTrak presented an android app that makes it easy to report encounters with bribery. A 2005 study conducted by Transparency International in India found that more than 55% of Indians had first-hand experience of paying bribes … read more

Proxy voting or delegated voting is an idea for the reorganization of our public decision making. Neither focusing on direct democracy nor representative democracy, proxy voting tries to combine both sides. It gives everyone the right to take part in every decision directly, but also the possibility to authorize others to vote in their name. This way everyone can keep full control but does not need to pretend to be an expert in all political fields.

The organizational efforts for this method are high and … read more

A new year often starts with the best intentions: Fighting against white supremacy, eating less meat to reduce the carbon footprint, becoming a queer rights activist, starting a revolution… But very often we are frustrated by the small impact our actions unfold or the typical lack of time prevents us from a commitment in the long term. What could come in handier than an initiative with the promising slogan ‘saving the world in one weekend’?

This is the self-ironic motto of the German initiative ‘Synagieren‘ … read more

I grew up with parents being heavily involved with (local) policies. My pencils were collected during several election campains in front of local supermarkets, in my first computer game a dinosaur introduced the European Union to me and even some of our glasses at home were branded with the logo of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It was a happy childhood and my parents will never get tired of telling me how I used to scale random staircases and make an off-the-cuff speech … read more

Stephan Pfaff is a full-time volunteer. The young man puts all the money he earns right into the mammoth project that he and his friends have dedicated their lives to at the moment: The Unity Express will be a train that rolls through 24 European countries and 14 cities in only four weeks. The team expects more than 1,000 passengers to live, work and play together in the different wagons.

“We are not the advocates of the administrative machinery, but we believe in European integration”, … read more