Archive for October, 2008
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15. October 2008 – 12:49 by Centre for E-Government
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At the Centre for E-Government, Danube University Krems (we hosted the EDem08, remember us?) we have a couple of ideas we would let to get started on- the first one is to establish an online open access journal alongside the yearly EDem conference. It will address theoretical and applied topics from e-democracy to e-government. If you are interested in participating, read below and get in touch with me (noella.edelmann@donau-uni.ac.at)!
Details ( please note that if you are interested, we are open to your ideas and suggestions as well as what role you would like to have):
The e-journal will address an international audience being at least bi-lingual, German and English. It will be published twice a year. All content will be available for free for readers on the Internet under a creative commons license. It is the journals intention to be a full open access journal. Thus also authors should have free access to publish their works. Of course the online open access journal will follow the highest standards of peer review. Thus the e-journal intends to be another attractor for young as well as experienced scholars to connect with the Centre for e-Government at the Danube University of Krems.
The e-journal is asking for your participation as a joint international partner organization or your personal board membership including peer reviewing responsibilities.
To receive at hoc the best visibility on the web the Centre will execute its e-journal with the well-established open source platform Open Journal System by the Public Knowledge Project, which was developed at Stanford University. This platform will distribute the contents with its sophisticated metadata possibilities at once in all relevant search engine databases including Google scholar and scientific content harvesters like the Open Archives Harvester. Furthermore the e-journal will be announced in all relevant open directories including the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Librarians’ Internet Index, and many more. It is the journals mission to promote the published articles of its authors at its best.
The Open Access Journal will be promoted via the EDem conference and other conferences addressing the topics, plus extensive community relations within the scientific communities interested in the topics as well as within diverse social software applications and mailing lists on the web. Furthermore the international relations with university libraries will ensure the availability of the e-journal to future students and researchers.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Posted in News, Partners, Projects, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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13. October 2008 – 14:58 by Rolf Luehrs
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eDemocracy and eParticipation are on top of the agenda of different conferences in the next couple of weeks – three of which are taking place at the same time.
More and more conferences are focusing on topics like eDemocracy and eParticipation, that is the good news. Unfortunately the planning of these events is not at all coordinated and it happened that very important events will take place in parallel, competing for both, prominent speakers and interested participants.
As we have already announced, Thursday and Friday next week the 9th World eDemocracy Forum will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Paris). PEP-NET has organised a round table discussion on participatory budgeting. Several high level representatives of politics and public administrations will contribute to the different workshops and plenary session like e.g. André SANTINI, Mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, State Secretary for Civil Service, Eric BESSON, Minister of State for the development of digital economy (France) or Suvi LINDÉN, Minister of Communications (Finland).
Almost at the same time, from Wednesday to Friday next week, the Council of Europe has organised the Forum for the Future of Democracy to be held in Madrid. This event is especially focused on eDemocracy and eInclusion, e.g. ICT for participatory democracy, E-tools in citizen participation at local level and e-participatory Budgets. Speakers are – among others – Ann Macintosh (University of Leeds), William Dutton (Director of the Oxford Internet Institute ) and Herbert Kubicek (Institute for Information Management, Bremen)
Also overlapping with these two events is the Internet Research 9.0 Conference to be held from Oct 15 -18 in Copenhagen (Denmark). There are different tracks dedicated to eParticpation, Civil Society and Politics. Keynote speakers are Mimi Ito, Rich Ling and Stephen Graham.
By the beginning of next week the 5th Quality Conference for Public Administrations in Europe opens. Claim: “The Citizens at the Heart of Public Quality”. The sub-theme 2 is called “Citizen participation as a driving force towards public quality”. Although not exclusively focussed on E-services there are lots of presentations on the intersection of participation and IT.
At the same time (Oct. 21-22) the Global Forum takes place in Athens (Greece). This years theme is called COLLABORATIVE CONVERGENCE, Users Empowerment in the Global Digital Economy. Session 8 is called “Government Challenges. Converging Technologies / E-Democracy and E-Participation. As panellist I have the pleasure to represent PEP-NET in this track.
Last but not least: On November 11 the E-Democracy ‘08 takes place in London. Keynote speakers are Mark Byford, Deputy Director-General, BBC and Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.org. PEP-NET will present the plenary session “E-participation in Europe”
A personal remark: Our Department for Interactive Communications (five full-time employees) at TuTech Innovation GmbH has managed to attend all of these conferences representing at the same time PEP-NET. Although we are looking forward very much to the next weeks, this is at the same time a real challenge for us. And we are probably not the only ones who are suffering from to much conferences in October and November. Dear organisers of eDemocracy and eParticipation events: Could we please try to avoid these kind of overlaps next year? –Much appreciated!
Posted in News, TuTech | 9 Comments »
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10. October 2008 – 11:24 by Mi-voice
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We have just joined pep-net and are excited about working with other organsiations within the network.
Mi-Voice is an electronic voting and consultation tool which encourages people to participate in democratic events by allowing them to take part online or via a text message. Currently our products are mainly being used by local authorities for various types of community engagement however we are always branching out into new markets and currently have 2 universities using the Mi-Voice as well.
By joining the network we are hoping to keep abreast of eParticipation throughout Europe. We are also looking to expand Mi-Voice into Europe and are looking for organsiations based in Europe to work with.
If you want to contact me my email address is fcarrington@mi-voice.com
Posted in members | 1 Comment »
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9. October 2008 – 10:02 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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A few days ago I wrote and article about the State of Blogging today and claimed that blogging was not dead but maturing. The launch of Change.org´s social action blog network supports this point. Blogging has developed into one online tool among other to achieve distinct goals.
The change.org project mission statement is both clear and ambitious: “Change.org is an online hub and media network for social issues and collective action”. The whole project is organized along the lines of causes – meaning topic relevant to the general public. On each causes site, as for example on Global Warming, knowledgeable authors write articles and users can decide to support the cause and donate money to tackle the problem. Beyond these functions one central idea is to call users to action. For this purpose a set of possible action in which users can join is display next to the cause. User can also start actions themselves. The site seems to have found their own approach to blogging and tackling social issues on the net.
Change.org already has developed a considerable reach (Alexa.com) and I assume it will growth steady especially with the US elections ahead. The example of change.org shows that the term blog is not even necessary to actually describe what the project is doing but the action and topic itself is the focus.
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8. October 2008 – 17:38 by Rolf Luehrs
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Round table discussion about Participatory Budgeting and ICT at the 9th World e-Democracy Forum in Paris, October 16, 9.00 – 10:30
Participatory budgeting is a method to involve ordinary citizens in the decision-making process of allocating municipal or public budgets. Proponents of this method suggest that this involvement leads to more sustainable and equitable public spending, increased governmental transparency and accountability and creates stronger links between citizens and (local) government.
While participatory budgeting is already quite established in different municipalities in South America and especially in Brazil, more and more European governments are currently experimenting with this participatory instrument. In some cases, like e.g. the cities of Hamburg and Freiburg (Germany) or the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil), participatory budgeting has been supported by ICT and web based systems.
The round table discussion will focus on questions whether the Internet is likely to increase the quality and the acceptance of participatory budgeting and what are the specific strengths and weaknesses of eParticipation solutions in this domain.
Input statements from:
Rüdi
ger Kruse
Member of the Hamburg state and municipal Parliament. Speaker for finance and sustainability of the Christian Democrats. Rüdiger Kruse was one the driving forces of the e-Participatory Budgeting project in the City of Hamburg, 2006.
Ruth J
ackson
Research and Information Officer for the Participatory Budgeting Unit (PBU), a project of the charity Church Action on Poverty. The Unit’s remit is to support and encourage the uptake and development of participatory budgeting (PB) in the UK.
Tiag
o Peixoto
PhD researcher at the European University Institute (EUI – Italy), and associate researcher at the Electronic Democracy Centre (Switzerland), a joint venture of Zurich University, the EUI and the Oxford Internet Institute (UK). Tiago Peixoto has recently conducted research into the use of ICTs in Participatory Budgeting and, particularly into one of the most significant e-Participatory Budgeting projects which has been realised in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2006.
Posted in good practice, News, Trends, TuTech | 1 Comment »
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8. October 2008 – 12:26 by Dan Jellinek
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The US elections are just a month away and we have had some interesting uses of the internet and new technologies in the campaigning process.
As ever – due to the number of innovative high-tech companies in the US, the scale of the campaigns, and the amount of money spent – US politicians and parties are leading the way in the use of online tools.
A recent blog posting by the UK MP Ian Taylor (http://corpblog.nextfifteen.com/2008/internet-politics.aspx) praised Barack Obama’s raising of 36 million dollars in funding online when campaigning for his party’s nomination, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 6 million dollars. Taylor also noted that Obama now has a million supporters on Facebook compared with McCain’s 150,000.
It is interesting that Ian Taylor is the MP pointing out these facts, since he is a Conservative – not a natural supporter of Obama. But he is a rare techno-savvy MP in the UK Parliament, and on the council of the Parliamentary IT Committee PITCOM.
Another recent development is the launch by Obama’s camp of an iPhone application making it easy for people to call their friends and bring them into the campaign – see for example the BBC story on this at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7649753.stm
Ultimately, however, the proof of whether online campaigning can really make the difference will be in the election result. In the past there have been other candidates – Howard Dean is the obvious one who springs to mind – who have gathered huge momentum through online grassroots campaigns, only to lose through making gaffes on the traditional medium of TV.
Will Obama become the first US President who can claim the internet as an of the most important contributors to his election?
We will know in a month. And I can’t resist a mention – we will be dissecting the online race a week after its conclusion at a special workshop at the London e-democracy conference:
http://www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08/
Posted in members, News, TuTech | No Comments »
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7. October 2008 – 16:07 by Fraser Henderson - ICELE
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For all the promise of eParticipation initiatives, barriers to participation centric to eInclusion (such as digital literacy and access) loom as increasingly prevalent. A renewed fear is that expanding technological horizons will create fresh gaps between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
Next Generation Access (NGA) or, put simply, ‘fibre’ connections for superfast broadband are already in-place in countries such as Japan, Korea and Singapore. For those lucky enough to get it, connections are more reliable and typically offer six-fold speed increases compared to current broadband. More significantly, European nations are at a decision making stage about roll-out and upgrade.
Why do we need superfast broadband? For a start, everyday household items such as televisions and fridge-freezers are becoming internet enabled. This creates more parallel demand, for example, watching high-definition IPTV while your health is being monitored via telemedicine. Secondly the extra capacity offers resilience and the possibility for a new generation of applications.
But the cost is vast, an estimated £29 billion for a UK national infrastructure. This is hard to swallow when the demand for high consumption is currently still limited to a minority and wireless technologies are increasingly competitive.
The danger is that the business model for NGA will be based on high-consumption countries, cities or economic ‘hot-spots’ first – those which offer a good return on investment. On this basis the citizens most in-need of NGA, such as those alienated in rural communities, could be the last to adopt.
The challenge for the eParticipation community will be to harness the power of superfast broadband while catering for with the lowest common denominator and ensuring that business benefits do not dwarf social ones. A new round of eInclusion policy is sure to follow….anybody fancy a bet on the outcome?
Posted in Trends | No Comments »
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6. October 2008 – 15:07 by Maren Luebcke
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From September 29th till the 30th the edem08 conference took place in beautiful Krems / Austria. Organized by the Danube University together with the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration two interesting days date back. After evote08 (organised by pep-net member e-voting.cc) the edem08 conference focussed on the broad spectrum of eDemocracy in general. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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3. October 2008 – 16:42 by Madarász Csaba
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The European Comission has launched the Financial Tranasparency System yesterday, by Administration and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas. The website will making details of the beneficiaries of EU funding publicly available for the first time.
(EurActive.com)
One of the basics of working Edemocracy is transparency. But what do citizens require in relation to transparency?
By having a short outlook on the site, I could say, that maybe more, than just browsing in the year 2007, and having visible the beneficiaries. 
The official news says:
The search engine “allows users to analyse and compare information on beneficiaries and policy areas more easily,” stated the EU executive. Data is organised according to criteria like the country of the beneficiary, the Commission department which awarded the funding and the amount of money concerned. Commissioner Kallas said “we have always claimed that EU programmes benefit individuals, companies and civil society across and beyond the 27 member states”. But the new website would prove this, enabling “any EU citizen to check what and when they want,” providing “a very effective form of accountability,” he added.
I am sure, that this as a first step great. But also wondering, when initiatives will come out, like it can be seen in the US, and could be grabbed by the great works of the Sunlight Foundation.
Our leaders must make stronger commitment to transparency by creating more open data structures and design better access to policy. There are great examples to know about, however, sometimes, situation which is created by different legal systems can lead to dispute, as it has happened in Sweden, last year
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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3. October 2008 – 14:22 by Civil College
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Since Hungarian language is a bit different from latin languages, the term, e-democracy and e-participation sounds really childish and does not give back the meaning behind. However, for us, community developers the terms like e-democracy and e-participation might have a different meaning as well – it might be some good and usable things here for our communities.
The language barrier, the lack of common meaning is not the only problem if we are looking for initiatives, projects that are labelled as e-participation in Hungary. There are two other significant factors, that are helping e-participation to stay hidden for the investigating eyes.
The uncertainity of the w.r.s
- If an organization uses eparticipation tools (which are normally not called in the technological jargon e-participatory tools) it is likely to happen, that will not think about these tools, services as e-participation, so it will be “tagged” differently and stay hidden.
- There is no such initiative to make the meaning common and widespread. There are suppliers around the organizations with technological background, and there are advisors and officials, who has never heard about such things like that. Thus, the level of public trust towards politicians are extremely low every year- according to the annual study, which is carried out during the Citizen Participation Week, in late September each year. So we can not really trust in their initiative power – as citizens.
The situation might be similar in many countries. But what seems to be a bigger problem, that e-participation and e-democracy is an unknown among the most journalists and scientists as well. Maybe this is not surprising, since democracy is a really new thing in Hungary, where people get used to follow dictation for decades, and the roots of fear from power and hopelessness to change the political elit has become one of our nations characteristics. But it is not only about the political elit’s behaviour – it is also about the general attitude towards learning, and citizenship culture.
It seems like that the only rich soil for e-participation are in the grassroots – in Hungary, among those, who understand technology, ready to apply their knowledge on a civil base. These things mostly happen by interest groups, as a reflection to unequal, or semi-democratic institutional behavior.
Read the rest of this entry »
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