14. November 2008 – 17:17 by Danish Technological Institute
Dear Colleagues,
Many of you may already know the European Journal of ePractice (EjeP), but do you know that the next special edition is devoted entirely to eParticipation!
The 6th issue of the Journal provides a good chance to write articles based on our work and experiences and provide an excellent opportunity to public, disseminate and most importantly to exchange experiences and ideas.
The aim of the Journal is to reinforce the visibility of articles as well as that of professionals while strengthen the overall ePractice.eu activity. The Journal promotes the diffusion and exchange of good practice in eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion and is available to all potential readers free of charge. The Journal currently has an audience of 50,000 professionals in Europe and beyond, and build on a community of some 14,000 members.
The deadline is 8 December, but I know that the editor for the eParticipation issue Jeremy Millard can be pursuaded to extent the deadline till the second half of December if asked nicely. Relevant links are provided below.
The D.E.P.P. association, is proud to be part of the Pep-Net group and we are culpably starting to post on the blog only today (after severe reprimands by the organizers).
D.E.P.P. (http://www.depp.it) is a non-profit organisation, based in Italy, that has been active in the last few yars both in the fields of partecipatory budget and of transparency.
In this first post I would like to describe the eDem project, which regards the partecipatory arena.
Back in 2004, D.E.P.P. won an Italian Government call on e-democracy, reaching the 4th position among 56 financed projects, and realized the eDem project, involving a number of local administrations, among the others: one of the local Municipalities of Rome.
The project revolved around a quite simple Web2.0 site, that allowed citizens to post problems and propose solutions and have them emerge by an integrated rating and commenting mechanism. An online discourse and continuous voting implementation, substantially.
Problems and solutions were categorized along two dimensions: territories and themes; the themes mainly regarded the array of issues addressed by the paricular partecipatory budget process already in place within the particular administration involved.
The web site aimed at becoming a tool for the integration of offline partecipatory budget processes with online ones, in order to shorten the gap with those segments of population tipically not involved, nor reachable in this kind of traditional partecipatory activities, i.e. students, minorities, families, busy commuters and so on.
To this end, the same crew of enablers that used to work in the offline discussions, were trained to use the platform. Offline discussions were reported in the web site, and the emerging problems and proposals on the site were reported back to local assemblies. The final votations were held offline, but the best-rated online proposals were admitted to the votations as well.
eDem was completely implemented using open source tools, with the collaboration of the National Research Council and is, as of today, available as a zip file, on the web site of the Domotics Laboratory of the CNR.
Mind the gap, though, you hackers out there, the code is open and free, but it lacks documentation.
The same source code was used to implement four different online partecipatory platforms, with different territories, thematic sections and communicational features, so it has fullfilled the requirement to be re-usable, which was explicitly requested in the 2004 call.
The final outcome of the project cannot be defined as a success, though. The number of total subscribers in the case of the local Municipality in Rome was 250, out of a total population of over 150’000. The total number of offline partecipants, though, was about 400, making it clear that it was not a tecnology barrier issue, but a precise political one.
There were no further fundings coming out of the italian government on e-partecipation, at least at a national level.
Net working/Networking: Citizen Initiated Politics (eds. Tapio Häyhtiö & Jarmo Rinne)
Publisher: Tampere University Press
Net Working / Networking explores the variety in use and approaches to political participation and mobilisation occurring on the Internet. The chapters in the book represent various viewpoints mixing theory with empirical cases. Big politics is broken into pieces to become a multitude of small, more personalised political engagements. Topics addressed range from e-democratic participation to Internet piracy.
The main focus of the studies in this book is to highlight the potential capacity of computer-mediated communication to increase people power. Purpose of the book is to outline the political struggles arising from citizens’ own experiences of creating virtual open spaces that they shape in personally distinctive ways.
E-Voting.CC, the competence centre for electronic voting and participation in Vienna, has started the first European E-Voting competition last January. Our aim was to get international submissions of single persons or teams who programmed an Internet voting system which can be used for association elections.
The submitted systems had to comply with the following:
? A fully operational voting system, accessible on the Internet has to be submitted.
? The software’s source code must be completely revealed and accessible for further, licence-free development.
? Documentation of the software and all processes is compulsory.
? The fundamentals of general, equal, secret, free, direct and personal elections must be met and secured.
? The system shall facilitate the clearing of elections of unincorporated associations.
? WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) conformity for barrier free internet access has to be ensured.
An international jury of five expert selected three of the eight submissions we’ve got to be presented at the Third International Conference on Electronic Voting, which has was held from the 6th to 9th of August 2008 in Bregenz, Austria – one of the locations of the new James Bond movie. The three competitors had to defend their systems in front of the jury, which scrutinized the systems thoroughly.
The lucky winner was a Greek team called “PNYKA” from the University of Patras. Their solution could score through sophisticated security measures and high usability. PNYKA was the largest team and their members had developed the system for an earlier research program, which was an advantage indeed.
Two subsidized awards were given to an Austrian (Daniel Ratzinger) and a German student (Gerold Grünauer).
Winning team: PNYKA Country: Greece
Members: Yannis Stamatiou, Christos Manolopoulos, Dimitris Sofotassios, Giorgos Avramidis and Antonis Tatakis
Short system description: PNYKA is an internet based electronic voting system which was developed within the scope of a research program of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Development.
We hope, that our project created a tool with which associations can set up their elections and that the discussion on internet voting systems and electronic participation was nourished.
The conference “Women&Technologies: research and innovation” was held in the context of IFIP WCC World Computer Congress (www.wcc2008.org). The whole day of the conference aimed to reflect, at the international level, on the situation of the presence of women in the scientific and NICTs worlds, on female contributions to innovation, creation and production of ICTs, on progress in the overcoming of gender stereotypes in this scientific and working area, and on good practises for engaging young women with NICTs.
Four themes were tackled:“women and ICTs in Europe”, “Art and affective computing”, “Interaction and dialog in the community on the web of the future” and “Innovation in the enterprises e in the Institutions” (www.womentech.info). During the second section in the afternoon, about “Art and affective computing: Interaction and Dialogues in Communities on the future Web”, e-participation and e-inclusion were also discussed. The web is the biggest public space we have ever known, with all the potential and risks linked to that: the web provides enormous opportunities to extend social relationships, to enrich and share knowledge; but this implies also problems of inclusion, inequalities in web access and use, and the necessity of rules (a sort of Bill of Rights for the Internet).
Covering e-inclusion, Fiorella De Cindio focused on e-citizenship for women too, and on the need to create suitable tools for the enlargement of e-participation and e-deliberation, processes which she regards with a general optimism, notwithstanding the fact that the results of many Italian experiments in the area have not been flattering. Her data about citizens’ participation in some civic networks and e-participation experiences in Lombardia (Northern Italy) show low rates of participation, mostly in cases in which public administrations have not invested concretely in the e-projects; in the same contexts there is a much lower participation of women: 20% of the participants in the experiment of Mantova’s civic network, 30% in Vigevano and in Milano, 16% in Brescia (from a total of 78, 120, 2130 and 137 participants respectively).
So, how can more women and marginalized groups be involved in these e-processes? And is it a priority? From the top-down opportunities to the potentialities of net communities and web 2.0: PaolaBonomo (senior marketing director, eBay Italy) looked at the characteristics of digital communities, about their functioning, the incentives they are based on, and about the characteristics of their leaders. Why are most of the leaders men even in a community such as eBay: a space of self-entrepreneurship where the barriers to access (a part the structured ones) are very low and where the first contributors are mostly women (56%), but the first 10 sellers remain men?
Very interesting was also the speech by Christine Lisetti who presented her studies about affective computing (a field of research where there have been many pioneer women since the ‘90s) and its different possible practical applications: not only the avatars’ expressions, but also emotion recognition to recognize the emotions of the faces of pilots, astronauts and scuba divers; and technological tools to monitor veteran patients who are far from medical centres and to establish an effective/operative communication between patients and doctors in difficult contexts.
The meeting was also the occasion to award the Le Tecnovisionarie® 2008 prize to Fiorella Operto (Deputy Chairperson of the School of Robotics, Genova) for her commitment to the fight against gender inequalities, involving young women in science and technology, and creating self-confidence in girls technology-related abilities, particularly in her field (robotics) that seems to be the discipline of the future. Robotics is one of the most male dominated disciplines, but creative minds of both men and women, if free to express themselves, can overcome conditioning and ideological obstacles: so it’s necessary to find more opportunities of access for young women and to fight against old dichotomic stereotypes about the pretended differences in capacities of men and women that relegate both to a rigid division of duties, experiences, skills: snuffing out every potentiality of each person.
Michela Balocchi (Research fellow, University of Bergamo)
During the XXII Annual Conference of Italian Society of Political Science (www.sisp.it), held in Pavia last September, a wide space was dedicated to a theoretical and empirical reflection on participation and deliberation, on national and international political communication through the web, on participative and deliberative public policies, on ICT tools used for implementing participative and deliberative processes, promoted by political institutions as well as by civil society, and on the quality of these processes.
The panel on “Quality of deliberation” (Qualità della deliberazione,chairs: Bobbio and Lanzara) focused on some Italian experimentations of deliberative processes: three citizen juries which took place in Piemonte between the 2006 and the 2007 were analyzed by Chiari («Come valutare un processo deliberativo? Riflessioni a partire da tre giurie di cittadini”); a deliberative poll carried out in Turin was studied by Manca («Effetto deliberative polling: un tentativo di misurazione») and by Fiket («La democrazia deliberativa nella pratica: il cittadino ideale e il cambiamento degli atteggiamenti. Uno studio sul Deliberative Poll di Torino»); and a local experimentation of deliberative democracy was analyzed by Floridia («Democrazia deliberativa, strategie negoziali, strategie argomentative: un’analisi del dibattito pubblico sul “caso Castelfalfi»).
The thorny problem of the “politics of regulation of cybernetic networks” (Politiche di normazione delle reti cibernetiche) was tackled by Amoretti and Santaniello; in the same panel there was also discussion of the use of the web by extreme-right political groups and about its effects in terms of the establishing international links and of the building and reinforcement of identity (Caiani and Parenti: «Right-wing extremist groups and Internet: Construction of Identity, Source of Mobilization and internationalization»).
Finally a whole panel was dedicated to “participative and deliberative public policies” (Le politiche pubbliche partecipative e deliberative, chairs: Freschi and Raffini): particular attention was paid to those public policies that used ICTs. Freschi, Raffini and Mete examined the two electronic town meetings carried out by the Regional Government of Tuscany in 2006 and in 2007: the first one was about the provision of guidelines for a regional law on participation; the second one was dedicated to the citizen participation in decision making about public health expenses («Electronic town meeting regionali in Toscana: dal 2006 al 2007»). Balocchi and Tizzi presentedfour case-studies of local e-democracy («Quattro casi-studio di e-democracy locale in Italia. Le esperienze di Agoradeidiritti, Cossatosiprogetta, PaìS e PartecipaPug»), which are part of wider research focused on the implementation of the National call, launched (April 2004) as part of the second phase of the Italian National plan for e-government. The main findings show serious difficulties in terms of political inclusion, a discontinuous commitment by the institutional actors, a scarce coordination between different administration sectors, and an uncertain quality of deliberation processes: while some good practises exist, there are much others which are merely symbolic, making clear the risks of a distorted usage of e-participation.
Michela Balocchi (Research fellow, University of Bergamo)
and other citizen based approaches to change IT usage of Hungarian Government.
Since the Hungarian Taxation office has been producing the necesarry taxation program only for Windows based coputers, and has decided that all Hungarian businesses now have to submit their tax returns on-linem. The solutionmade online taxation not working for non-microsoft based computers, encouraging some of the Hungarian IT businessmen battleing against the ridiculous segregation.
“Why should a Hungarian national and EU citizen be forced to buy proprietary American software in order to communicate with his Government? There are many, many ways that a government can collect data on-line without forcing its citizens to buy expensive and unreliable foreign software.”
Next Tuesday, November 11, UK’s most popular annual conference on e-Democracy takes place at the spectacular headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in the city of London.
Topics to be covered include e-democracy in local government, online citizen consultation, grassroots campaigns, open source software in e-democracy and much more.
As of 11.15 a.m. PEP-NET presents the plenary session “E-Participation in Europe”, with Renate Mitterhuber (Head of Department for E-Government, City of Hamburg), Csaba Madarász (Central and Eastern European Citizens Network, Hungary) and Julia Glidden (Board Member, MOMENTUM Project and Managing Director, 21c Consultancy).
The final speaker programme can be found here. Look forward to seeing some of you in London!
So, it’s happened: the first major US ‘internet candidate’ has actually been elected.
There have been contenders in the past: the colourful governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, set the template for grassroots campaigning online. But so far, no US Presidential candidate has ever been able to make the internet work so well for them that it has made the difference between winning and losing.
According to a piece in the New York Times, the Obama result has “rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage — and withstand — political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago.”
And it is certainly true that Obama used the internet, including for the first time web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and iPhone applications, to devastating effect, building on the techniques developed by Ventura, Joe Trippi for Howard Dean, and quite a few Republicans as well to communicate directly with citizens, raise huge amounts of relatively clean money, and mobilise supporters and voters on a vast scale.
On the other hand, a little perspective is needed.
Obama won for many reasons, of which the internet is just one. Others include the desire of the US people to change political direction; Obama’s charisma (and that of his family); and his spending of the money on more ‘traditional’ campaigning media such as TV and telephones. This was a superbly-run campaign, across the board – after being out-thought last time around by the maestro Karl Christian Rove, aka The Architect, the Democrats were obsessive in their attention to detail in all aspects of the campaign, and it showed. They probably also benefited from the combination of an aged opponent and a, shall we say, divisive deputy.
So it’s hard to say precisely what affect the internet had on Obama’s campaign.
Ultimately, as well, the internet is simply a technology, a tool. It is a new tool, one among many, to help people communicate with each other: but you still need a message, and credibility.
And yet – it really does feel like a breakthrough for those of us who have watched internet campaigning since it began. Because the amount of money raised online, combined with the huge volume of genuine discussion, campaigning and messaging that took place using new technologies, was on a scale so much larger than anything we have seen before that it seems undeniable that the era of internet campaigning has now definitely – and permanently arrived. This is what the New York Times means when it senses a Sea Change. Techie toys might not win you elections on their own, but from now on, all candidates are surely going to have to win the online election as well as the offline election, to give themselves the best change of being elected at all.
NB: I look forward to continuing this debate next week at our conference!
www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08
On Socialreporter David Wilcox published an interview with mySociety founder Tom Steinberg on the occaison of mySociety’s fifth birthday. Congratulation Tom, keep on the good work!
Here is the videocast titled The five year journey from Civic Hacking Fund to mySociety:
