Hei Truls, Mail med info fra Estland og sin Thinking Party

Mauricio

Message 25. febr 2239

Hello Mauricio, Here is more information about the national thinking party.

Greetings, Toomas

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Estonians to open virtual happiness bank and national forum to fight

recession

 

Hundreds of people in Estonia are making the final preparations to launch a

massive public forums to collect ideas how to rule better their country and

to open a virtual happiness bank where people-the-clients can increase the

virtual money on their virtual bank account by doing good for people in

need.

 

The aim of the virtual happiness bank is to encourage people to help others

in current hard times and to get the people the feeling that doing good is

not less a richness than earning money.

 

"In addition we are preparing national campaign to collect best practice

ideas to improve the life in Estonia," Estonian Internet entrepreneur

Rainer Nolvak, one of the main organizers of the project told AFP on

Tuesday.

 

On May 1, 2009 the organizers wish to have 100 000 people in the 1.3-million

strong state to attend the very same day one of the the public forums that

will all be all taped on videos, made available in net, and later summarized

to outline the best public ideas how to make the state function better and

improve the life of the people. Those who can´t attend the events can follow

and participate the forums live via net. Organizers hope to open the same

day 400 to 1000 forums, depending of the amount of people who are called to

register in April.

 

"We started to make preparations last autumn, being encouraged by the

massive turnout of people last spring when we called people to clean up the

state from garbage.The success of the campaign proved us that people are

ready to commit themselves for their state. And we think that specially when

all world is facing recession we need lot of thinking also at

grassroot-level to figure what we all can do to fight recession and make

the life better," Nolvak added.

 

 

 

 

The "Let's do it" campaign last year ended a

one-day clean-up on May 3 when fifty thousand volunteers turned out  to

collect 10,000 tonnes of illegally dumped garbage. The campaign organisers

used special software based on Google Earth, positioning software for mobile

phones and mobile phones with GPS to map and photograph 11,000 illegal

garbage dumps across all 45,227 square kilometers of Estonia.

 

"The main aim of the project we prepare now is to use a modern technology to

create "Democracy machine" that among other things will help to increase

coherency among people, bring a state closer to citizens and force people to

become actively involved to improve their life instead of passive hoping

that someone else has to do that," Nolvak added.

 

"All the 400-1000 forums will be led by people who are trained first to conduct open space meetings. The topics

will tackle the most important problems at both local and national level.

All forum group heads must select the topics from our website

www.minueesti.ee (my Estonia) by April 20, 2009, " Anneli Ohvril, head of

the Communications Team of the program "Lets do it - lets think" told AFP.

 

"The forum participants will select best practice ideas that they start to

implement. We expect to get at least one thousand best ideas that can be

implemented. Later in December people will be asked to vote on all the local

and national best ideas to select the ones whom they support most," Ohvril

added.

 

The organisers also help that with the help of IT the campaign will enable

to get new people into Estonian politics where - at least by recent public

polls - most people seem to have lost the trust in politicians.

 

"The politics seems these days a lot like closed club lead by politicians of

whom many seem to have lost the contact with their people, being more

worried about their own wellbeing instead of figuring out how to make life

better for all. Our aim is to remind the nation that it is us the people

that make up the state and we hope the initiative might turn out as best

practice also in other states," Ohvril added.

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