We  – Open Knowledge Sweden and the Latvian NGO MyVoice – have just concluded the project “Open Cities for EU Citizens” (OpenCit) but we are already planning a follow-up.  The OpenCit project supported mobile EU citizens with information about the rights to participate in the European Parliament and municipal elections, gave EU citizens living in Latvia opportunities to engage in local politics and conducted research on how the digital Open2Vote.eu  platform can be scaled to other European countries.

On the platform Open2Vote.eu, EU citizens residing in Latvia along with Latvian citizens now engage in a voting “for” or “against” legislative bills in the pipeline. On Open2Vote.eu citizens can also compare their votes with the ones of the politicians. The platform provides objective and real-time political matchmaking based on the actual weekly work of politicians – not just promises made by politicians once every four years.

By networking activities and a feasibility study published in December 2021, we have examined if the Open2Vote.eu can be adapted to the Swedish context and beyond. Our findings show that there is a clear interest for this type of platform among both larger cities such as Malmö and Göteborg, as well as among organisations representing expats, but that there is a lack of mandate and resources to implement it. 
Now, the Latvian and Swedish partners look to expand the gained expertise and the developed platform at the EU level within a larger consortium of strong civil society partners that will apply for joint funding. 

For details, please contact Alina Östling at [email protected]

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash