Gwangju Seo-gu '2021 Village Policy Assembly' Successfully Concluded

Published 26 Nov.2021 15:11(KST)

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Shin Dong-ho] Seo-gu, Gwangju Metropolitan City recently announced on the 26th that it successfully concluded the ‘2021 Seo-gu Village Policy Assembly,’ where residents directly discovered village issues, shared agendas, and decided on representative agendas through resident voting.

The ‘Seo-gu Village Policy Assembly’ is a public forum that goes a step beyond the Irak Festival, which has been a celebration sharing the achievements of village community activities conducted over the past three years. In this forum, residents from various sectors directly decide on proposals to determine village policies to be implemented in the following year.

Considering the COVID-19 situation, Seo-gu actively utilized online platforms such as Seo-gu Toktok, YouTube, and Band to minimize on-site attendance for this event.

Additionally, the entire process including public agenda presentations, discussions, and announcement of voting results was conducted in a two-track method with real-time video streaming.

In particular, to enable more residents to participate in the village policy decision-making process, advance online voting was conducted, with a total of 901 residents participating in both online and offline voting.

At the assembly, on-site voting was held to decide the representative agendas among those proposed by residents over about 30 days starting from September 23.

Despite activities being greatly restricted due to COVID-19, enthusiastic discussions and active participation by residents continued.

The voting results determined representative agendas by topic, including ▲ Let’s reduce the use of banners and signs to participate in climate crisis response activities. ▲ Tok! Tok! Fostering village activists starts with support and empathy. ▲ We hope there will be more children.

Seo-gu plans to concretize the project details for these agendas and reflect them in the ‘2022 Resident-led Village Creation Support Project Comprehensive Plan’ for full-scale promotion.

A Seo-gu official said, “The Seo-gu Village Policy Assembly is a process of realizing Gwangju Seo-gu-style democracy where residents participate together to propose, empathize, discuss, and vote,” and added, “We hope the Seo-gu Village Policy Assembly will serve as an opportunity for resident-participatory village activities to settle and further develop.”