Since Christian Leysen– the founding father of ADM – has now taken up a new responsibility in the political life of Belgium, he touched a completely different part in the daily life of everybody: Federal Parliament.
As Christian mentioned: we live in an era that would have come anyway, it only came faster…
We keep repeating Corona has a devastating effect on the health conditions and on the economy as a whole. On the one hand we see the Corona-statistics are improving but on the other hand we see people have more fear. The unknown of what will come is fearful and gives stress.
Though we have to recognize this Corona-era is an accelerator of ongoing trends in economy and society. Digital savviness must improve or you can’t be efficient at work. e-commerce has become indispensable to survive in our daily lives. But also the working time-slots changed overnight… The working population performs at different moments in time. The 9 to 5 generation has definitely left the scenes in favour of the conf-call-generation trying to work outside breakfast-lunch-dinner-bath and bedtime of their children at home… The danger to unbalance the amount of digital & physical work becomes real.
In fact the evolution - or digital transformation - of the Federal Parliament is a must. Covid-19 helped a lot:
- 13 out of 27 EU-parliaments worked remotely. Though, tradition prevails… digital meetings are still considered as temporary exceptions
- Full video-streaming is provided, but there is still traditional publishing : www.dekamer.be
- Commissions count 17 members, but there is an avalanche of ‘amendments’ & oral questions for government members
‘Digital voting’ is still not universally accepted. Being politicians they don’t always trust the results come from the members of parliament themselves… but this could be part of an other Digital Event at ADM: ‘how to build and increase trust among politicians’ :-)
