This time I'm lucky! An international conference with focus on elections and new forms of it is taking place right here in Vienna. And then the United Nations is organizing it and it is even for free. What a bargain!

Today was the first public day at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) which is located right next to the UNO city in the 22nd district. They expected somewhat 3500 people - to be honest I would have guessed there are around 1000 people at the conference. But it is international, people from Africa, Asia (Korea with an enormous presentation stand in the main hall - right across the Digital Austria stand) and Europe. Unfortunately you can hardly see any American, only Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University is present.

Anyhow - today were mainly big plenary discussions - I was quite impressed by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland (1990-1997), and her presentation on Human Rights issues where she compared the situation of the world right now with the world after WWII. We have a big fragmentation, a big challenge with the global warming and still 30.000 children dying of sicknesses that could be avoided with simple vaccines.

Still the topic I'm interested in most - elections - will be discussed in a workshop organized by International IDEA on Thursday. One speaker was Pippa Norris - I really enjoyed her presentation - it was lively, active and really interesting on civil protests as form of political participation around the world.


Here you can see me, Fabio Bargiacchi, and Andrew Ellis listening to the presentations at the workshop