JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government
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An Empirical Analysis of the Theory of Planned Behavior: A Review of Its Application on E-democracy Adoption Using the Partial Least Squares Algorithm.
Get PDFPrior information systems (IS) research has provided valuable insight on technology adoption and use which is critical in deriving the benefits of information technology. These studies have utilized theories such as Technology Acceptance Model, Theory of Reason Action, and Technological determinism model to investigate technology adoption. This study continues in this line of research by evaluating the perspectives of investigating the concept of e-democracy within the framework of the Planned Behavioral Theory an extension to the Theory of Reason Action. The article seeks to explain internet and mobile enhanced citizen’s participation in democracy (e-democracy) base on their inherent (attitude) and environmental (subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) enablers and barriers to participate in e-democracy, and how the internet and wireless technologies can help to address democratic issues in resource poor settings such as the Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The study takes the perspective of critical realism and thus provides an example of the application of this research paradigm in an empirical study. We investigated this phenomenon by providing a theoretical grounded model that explains e-democracy adoption adapted from the theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and tested from an empirical examination of constructs using data from randomly selected sub-Saharan African countries. The results render support for the proposed hypotheses, emphasizing the role of human behavior on citizens’ e-democracy adoption
Fostering eGovernment as State Social Responsibility (SSR): Case Study of an Australian City Council
Get PDF Democracies around the world now face Citizen-apathy. This is a concern now more than ever faced by countries around the globe. eGovernment is undoubtedly a platform to deliberate and enable citizens regain confidence and faith in democratic processes. Citizens now seek Verifiable, Open, Transparent, Empathetic, Responsive and Sensitive Electronic Democracy and Government (VOTERS EDG, Karna, 2012). Similar to corporate world, there are voices stressing on govenments for the need to understand the stakeholders, their involvement, relationships and responsibilities of a state in eGovernance. Citizens everywhere now demand Verifiable, Open, Transparent, Empathetic, Responsive and Sensitive Electronically Democratic Government as a State Social Responsibity (SSR). Peoples movements and outbursts against authorities with the help of Word of Mouse (Karna, 2012) have established that transparent and open governance is the need of the hour. This paper presents findings of the study conducted in an Australian City Council for preparing the city council for ‘City e-readiness’ to initiate e-Government activities. We propose the idea of ‘Centrality of Citizens’ in context of eGovernment. We further build upon the original concept of deeming eGovernment as ‘State Social Responsibility’ (SSR) (Karna, 2010), by governments at all levels.
Editorial
Get PDFThis special edition of the JeDEM focused on Open Government and Open Information brings together a set of papers that contributes to understanding about creating new levels of openness in government and about the related opportunities, challenges, and risks. Collectively the papers inform current thinking about the transformation of government, the challenges and risks of pursuing an openness agenda, and the influence of culture and politics on new technical developments
Towards Distributed Citizen Participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods
Get PDFThis paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, and the global controversy surrounding Wikileaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange. The self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. By understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events
Making the Case for Anonymity in E-Participation - An Evaluation of Real Name Policy in Gütersloh’s Second Participatory Budget
Get PDFThe paper relates the debate about real name policy on social networking platforms and online forums to online moderated consultation processes in the area of e-participation. It analyses the case of the second participatory budget of the German city of Gütersloh. Three major rationales for real name policy in e-participatory projects are identified: the possibility to restrict access, prevention of offensive communication, and the strengthening of a transparent democracy. The five major objections identified are: distraction from issue-related dialogue, violation of privacy rights, administrative problems causing high expenditure of time and costs, negative media and public attention, and usability problems that may result in a low rate of participation. The evidence found indicates that the negative consequences of real name policy outweigh the positive ones. Important directions of further research are pointed out. The paper is an extended version of a paper presented at the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government in 2012
Democratic Process in Online Crowds and Communities
Get PDFThis paper explores the underlying structures that support participation and reputation in online crowd and community-based peer productions. Building on writings on open source, peer production, participatory culture, and social networks, the paper describes crowd and community structures as two ends of a continuum of collective action - from lightweight to heavyweight - differentiated by the extent of connectivity and engagement between contributions and among contributors. This is followed by an examination of the recognition, reputation and reward systems that support these collectives, and how these affect who controls and who contributes information. The aim of this exploration is to gain insight for understanding motivations and structures for e-participation in these different, potentially democratic, forums
The Potential of Metadata for Linked Open Data and its Value for Users and Publishers
Get PDFPublic and private organizations increasingly release their data to gain benefits such as transparency and economic growth. The use of these open data can be supported and stimulated by providing considerable metadata (data about the data), including discovery, contextual and detailed metadata. In this paper we argue that metadata are key enablers for the effective use of Linked Open Data (LOD). We illustrate the potential of metadata by 1) presenting an overview of advantages and disadvantages of metadata derived from literature, 2) presenting metadata requirements for LOD architectures derived from literature, workshops and a questionnaire, 3) describing a LOD metadata architecture that meets the requirements and 4) showing examples of the application of this architecture in the ENGAGE project. The paper shows that using metadata with the appropriate metadata architecture can yield considerable benefits for LOD publication and use, including improving find ability, accessibility, storing, preservation, analysing, comparing, reproducing, finding inconsistencies, correct interpretation, visualizing, linking data, assessing and ranking the quality of data and avoiding unnecessary duplication of data. The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) can be used to build the metadata architecture and achieve the advantages
Determining Citizens’ Opinions About Stories in the News Media
Get PDFWe describe a method whereby a governmental policy maker can discover citizens’ reaction to news stories. This is particularly relevant in the political world, where governments’ policy statements are reported by the news media and discussed by citizens. The work here addresses two main questions: whereabouts are citizens discussing a news story, and what are they saying? Our strategy to answer the first question is to find news articles pertaining to the policy statements, then perform internet searches for references to the news articles’ headlines and URLs. We have created a software tool that schedules repeating Google searches for the news articles and collects the results in a database, enabling the user to aggregate and analyse them to produce ranked tables of sites that reference the news articles. Using data mining techniques we can analyse data so that resultant ranking reflects an overall aggregate score, taking into account multiple datasets, and this shows the most relevant places on the internet where the story is discussed. To answer the second question, we introduce the WeGov toolbox as a tool for analysing citizens’ comments and behaviour pertaining to news stories. We first use the tool for identifying social network discussions, using different strategies for Facebook and Twitter. We apply different analysis components to analyse the data to distil the essence of the social network users’ comments, to determine influential users and identify important comments
What’s There Not to ‘Like’? Sustainability Deliberations on Facebook
No full textSocial media are considered ideal means to promote inclusive political participation by “reaching citizens where they are” in scalable and cost-effective ways. However, with all the excitement about the new virtual public sphere, little attention is given to the technical mediation itself – the affordances of e-deliberation platforms and the kind of interactions they support. In response, this paper aims to thicken the account of the interrelated political and technological contexts of e-deliberation. Using recent Facebook deliberations on sustainable transportation in Vancouver as our example, we argue that different rationales for public participation in policymaking animate different approaches to discourse, which, in turn, inform and are affected by different design and use strategies for e-deliberation platforms. Our argument suggests that the design affordances of e-deliberation represent opportunities to promote or curtail certain visions of a political culture of sustainability