JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government
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Collaborative Tools for e-Participation across Networks: The Comuno Networking Site for Public Governance and Services
Get PDFThis paper presents collaborative tools for public participation across multiple networking sites. The tools are part of the Comuno networking site for public governance and services, which is particularly targeted at the public sector (currently in alpha testing at http://comuno.org). The Broadcast tool allows cross-posting content from Comuno to a wide variety of other networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. The UserFeed and TopicFeed tools build RSS feeds from content published by a specific user or under a specific topic. The LifeStream tool gathers a user’s activities across multiple networking sites in the private account section at Comuno. These tools and related aspects of the Comuno networking site are discussed and presented in the context of deliberation and opinion-forming in a Swiss bilingual city
The Internet and Increased Citizen Participation in Government
Get PDFWhat roles do communication systems, information technologies and the internet play in fostering citizen participation and influencing the electoral and administrative decisions of government? The internet is simultaneously a world-wide broadcasting network, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic boundaries or time zones. This article describes the origins of participatory democracy, discusses how modern concepts of democracy link to citizen participation, and describes the ways that newly-created spaces on the internet referred to as “polispheres” are being used by political activists and candidates to facilitate wider collaboration and citizen participation. The following questions are addressed: What role does the internet play in fostering and aiding citizen participation in government? Does increased involvement lead to greater trust and confidence in government? What role did the internet play in apparently reversing downward trends in citizen apathy and drawing 8 million new voters to the United States 2008 presidential election? The article suggests that information technology facilitates broader citizen participation and identifies the challenges facing governments in adopting internet-based ICT strategies
A configurable architecture for e-participatory budgeting support
Get PDFParticipatory budgets are emerging as a paradigm for participation. However, there are many variants of such experiences suggesting a look of general methodology. Moreover there is a little use of ICT in this application context. We present a configurable architecture for e-participatory budget formation support
Electronic Support for the Legislative Consultation Process
Get PDFThe paper outlines the theoretical concepts of (legislative) consultation and describes the practical requirements of electronic support for consultation processes. It suggests that new electronic tools, in particular Social and Semantic Web tools, might have a sound potential to increase within civil society the interest in being involved in consultation processes, to improve the quality of argumentation within such processes, and to make more efficient the evaluation of their results
Transforming Government's Policy-making Processes
Get PDFWe have seen a lot of very welcome progress in terms of making it easier for citizens to input their views into government policy-making processes. However, governments and citizens are now in a similar situation – after a burst of initial enthusiasm, they are not sure what to do next. Governments have struggled to get the mass participation they would like and where significant participation has occurred, have had difficulty integrating it effectively into existing decision-making processes. Citizens have been unsure what to make of this new apparent openness and where they have engaged, have found it hard to know what difference their input made. The solution is to focus on using technology to make existing policy processes more transparent and more participative rather than creating separate e-participation initiatives. The challenge for governments is to open up the whole of the policy process and be prepared to flag up very clearly and explicitly the difference citizen input made. The challenge for e-democracy advocates is to convince policymakers that their ideas can improve the existing policy process rather than simply generating more inputs into it
Process Support for Increasing Participation in eParticipation
Get PDFThe lack of user acceptance of e-participation initiatives has been attributed to several factors, among them lack of motivation, poor transparency of process and lack of traceability of contributions. These deficits cannot be overcome by compliance with usability and accessibility guidelines. To increase user participation it is suggested to align such initiatives with the requirements of civil society groups who are more successful in mobilising public engagement and less with government requests. To enable and empower such groups to set up and maintain e-participation initiatives, a functional navigator for guiding users in configuring a platform as well as process support components are required. The latter focus on the transitions between different phases. The paper outlines how such an approach can be implemented to achieve a transparent circular flow of information and opinion between citizens and policy-makers in a collaborative environment which supports formal and informal political actors to work in partnership
To “e-” or not to “e-”: Re-locating innovation in “electronic” decision-making
Get PDFThis paper presents evidence from three global democratic organizations that “e-” is not a relevant modifier of decision-making concepts related to “democracy”. Defining “e-” as shorthand for decision-making skills and tools enabled by ICTs, including computer-mediated communication (CMC), it tests whether “e-” is an “incremental” innovation augmenting existing capabilities of democracy as a decision-making tool. It finds that “e-“ acts as a “radical” innovation to democratic decision-making tools by providing different capabilities than democracy. It also finds that indicators of good democratic decision-making (participation, sustainability, and impact) say little about the ability of “e-” to achieve the same desirable goals aspired by democracy
E-democracy remixed: Learning from the BBC's Action Network and the shift from a static commons to a participatory multiplex
Get PDFThis paper examines a five-year initiative by the UK's public service broadcaster, the BBC, to reinvigorate civic engagement at a time of declining public participation in politics. The Action Network project, originally called iCan, ran from 2003 to 2008 and was one of the most high profile and ambitious attempts by a public service broadcaster to foster eParticipation through an online civic commons. This study analyzes Action Network within the context of conceptualizations of the Internet as a networked, distributed and participatory environment and the shift towards what scholars describe as a networked public sphere. It suggests that the project did not have the impact anticipated as it was borne out of a paternalistic broadcast legacy, out of step with the trend towards distributed and collaborative discourse online that reassesses the notion that the public is simply a resource to be managed. This paper argues that the BBC experience provides lessons in how the media, and specifically public service broadcasters, can contribute towards greater political participation and democratic dialogue through the Internet by adopting Web 2.0 approaches that enable citizens to engage on different levels and at different times, depending on contexts
Pathways and Obstacles to eParticipation at the European level
Get PDFSince the early 2000's, the European Institutions have set up several eParticipation projects. These projects are embedded in different political strategies and are managed by different actors within the institutions. This leads to a wide variety of projects and prevents the European Union to develop a single and concerted strategy in terms of online participation.This paper intends to compare two different models of online consultation : the Commission consultations hosted on the site Your Voice in Europe, and the European Citizens' Consultation 2009. The paper tackles three main subjects : the institutional strategies which frame these sites; the actors that they mobilize; their main and collateral effects. The goal of this synthesis is to identify some key features that fit to the european context, in order to assess the possibilities of sustainability of such political experiments
European eParticipation developments: from ad hoc experiences towards mass scale engagement
No full textThis article looks at the challenges surrounding the development and mainstreaming of actions in the area of eParticipation in the EU. It analyses the experience of recent years, especially the ones from the eParticipation Preparatory Action, and looks at the latest policy initiatives which affect further developments in Member States and the EU