Two decades of lessons in digital engagement and new horizons

Digital development has gone fast in the past two decades. Largely on its own momentum, as tools and their applications come to impact both more deeply and extensively different spheres of life. Also, due to unprecedented events and circumstances – see, the pandemic – that sped up digital adoption.

The question is, what fell in the cracks of such transformation? Who, if at all, has been left behind?

Two of e-Governance Academy’s top e-democracy experts come together in this podcast episode – Kristina Mänd , Senior Expert on hosting duties, and Kristina Reinsalu , Programme Director. Twenty years of digital engagement and participation deepened ties between governments and citizens, but not without challenges and new, digital social risks to address.

This podcast is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the e‑Governance Academy, to sum up the most influential digital developments in the last two decades and shed light on how it shapes the digital transformation topics and priorities in the near future.

There will also be an e-Democracy session at the upcoming 2023 e-Governance Conference entitled "Nothing for us without us: Empowering the digitally vulnerable".

“The more digital and connected we are, the more societies are exposed to new types of vulnerability,” Reinsalu points out. Tackling digital vulnerability means preventing people from falling into the cracks of the new, digital social risks stemming from accelerated development.

Something that only effective engagement can support. “Because engagement makes us bigger , as a nation, culture, society.” The point of engagement, “is not to find a solution that makes everyone happy, but to take decisions that solve particular problems the best way,” Mänd concludes. “And it’s not just the result that you can be happy with, but the process too, how we get there.”