On Wednesday 3rd December from 9 am to 5 pm an enquete was held in “Palais Harrach” in Vienna. It’s topic was “A Chance for Political Participation through New Media”. The enquete was organized by the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research (BMWF), which initiated a project this year to open an E-Voting channel for students who cannot attend the student union elections physically.
These elections are scheduled for May 2009. The aim of this “one-day-conference” was to provide a platform for discussion between Austrian and international stakeholders.
This goal was truly achieved as the discussion was intense and also quite controversial. Representatives of the student union and also private persons criticized amongst others that E-Voting would open new ways for manipulation and possible electoral fraud. Some have also questioned whether the voting principles of the free and secret vote could be assured using E-Voting. There also were voices, for example Heinz Mayer’s, who is Professor for administrative law, who stated that postal voting would pose similar questions. In his opinion the step towards postal voting has been the wrong signal.
On the contrary there were experts who spoke in favour of an electronic voting channel for this election. Minister Hahn, who called the conference, said it is necessary to innovate voting, facing a globalized future. Pippa Norris, from Harvard University, found evidence in her latest research that the rate of media usage and the rate of openness to new cultures are strongly connected. Peter Filzmaier, a renowned Austrian political scientist, outlined the differing views of proponents and opponents and stated that an additional electronic voting channel would, in his opinion, account for our global societies’ needs for more mobility.
Robert Krimmer from E-Voting.CC gave an overview about the E-Voting project and explained its planned outline: The Internet voting channel will be available during the week before the paper voting. Authentication shall be established via a signature card – The BMWF sponsors 10.000 card readers for students who activate the citizens card function on their “e-card”, which is a card used in healthcare. There shall be no re-votation possibility and once a voter has decided to vote electronically, the paper vote is prohibited, but of course everybody has the free choice to use whatever channel.
The project is in an advanced planning phase, the implementation will commence at the beginning of the year. The slides of the presentation are available here.
There also were several other experts of great interdisciplinary scope who contributed to this enquete, for details please visit the link to the enquete above.
In the afternoon there were three workshops dealing with the topics:
“Citizens card as key for participation”
“Technical solutions for E-Voting” and
“Juridical aspects of E-Democracy”
In a wrap up session the conclusions of these workshops were drawn, although the most controversial was the third one dealing with E-Democracy, which has been drafted above.
All in all it was an interesting enquete which contributed to the Austrian discussion about the topic.
Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC
Discussion – Dialogue – Debate. That´s the slogan of the official discussion forum by the European Commission, “Debate Europe”. The Commission aims at actively listening to the public and getting involved into dialogue with citizens to raise trust in the European policy and to increase voter participation in the upcoming European elections 2009. The forum “Debate Europe” should gauge public opinion about the EU and about three important pan-European topics: climate change and energy, Europe’s future, Intercultural Dialogue. Additionally there is a forum for more general discussion about the EU and its institutions. European citizens from all Member States are invited to join and to debate with other citizens and members of EU institutions. Read the rest of this entry »
As some of you probably know, 2009 will be the first time, ePart, a new International Conference on eParticipation (www.demo-net.org/epart), will take place following the 8th international EGOV conference 2009 (part of the DEXA conference cluster, www.dexa.org). ePartis dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy. ePart will take place 3-4 September 2009 in Linz (AT), i.e. right after EGOV conference 30 August to 2 September 2009 with which ePartwill be co-located.
Contributions may be in the form of scientific papers (distinguishing between completed research and ongoing research), project presentations, and workshops. Each format encourages scientific rigor and discussions of the state-of-the-art, innovative research in progress, studies of practical eGovernment/eGovernance, eParticipation and eDemocracy projects, as well as system implementations.
Accepted papers will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Ongoing research and project papers will be published in the Trauner (Linz, AT) proceedings.
Important dates include:
Submission of papers: 28 February 2009
Submission of workshop/panel proposals: 15 April 2009
Submission of PhD projects: 15 April 2009
Notification of acceptance for papers: 15 April 2009
Notification of workshops/panels/PhD projects: 15 May 2009
I was in Vienna on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for the EU digital inclusion conference.
It was a hugely valuable event, with a large number of people from all over Europe attending to share expertise and knowledge of some really interesting projects.
One of the highlights was the announcement of the winners of the digital inclusion awards, about which Rolf has already posted: us Brits were proud that two UK local authorities were among the seven winners, but in truth all the shortlisted projects on display were of a high standard.
The conference looked at digital inclusion in a very broad sense. It covers efforts to ensure that socially excluded or disadvantaged groups have access to new technologies such as the internet and mobile phones, looking at multiple factors including poverty; health; disability; education; geography; political exclusion; technophobia; language; usability; and many other factors. But it also covers the importance of ensuring that everyone continues to have access to equal services even when they are digitally excluded, so for example sometimes it might still be better to use a paper newspaper to consult, if more people will be reached. There are global and international developmental issues, too, not just projects within single countries.
One key point I realised is that digital inclusion is actually the starting point for e-participation and e-democracy. Unless as many people as possible have access to all e-participation projects, whether directly, through intermediaries, or through non-digital channels which can then be fed into the same process, then they are not democratic. Accessibility, usability, and all areas of digital inclusion should be part of every e-participation project and should play a central role in PEP-NET’s thinking.
In the next few issues of E-Access Bulletin (www.headstar.com/eab), our free email newsletter on access to technology by people with disabilities, we will be writing up many of the Vienna sessions.
Launched alongside the UK government’s recent action plan on digital inclusion, it did not receive much coverage, but is definitely worth a look. It covers not just UK but international projects in all areas of digital inclusion. You may like to add your own work to it as well.
3. December 2008 – 13:17 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
The Council of ministers of the European Union issued a press release on November 27th which states the adoption of a strategy to reinforce the fight against cyber crime. Computer crime or cyber crime is a major problem of the networked world we live in. Spamming, Phishing and Identity theft are just a few of the potential crimes which can be committed using networked computers or other telecommunication devices.
From this angle it seems both reasonable and positive that the European Organisations try to crack down on these kinds of crimes. But a deeper look into the announcement and especially the proposed tools raises doubts and concerns. The Council suggests “operational measures, such as cyber patrols, joint investigation teams and remote searches to become part of the fight against cybercrime in the next five years”. The strategy also includes plans to link the different investigation forces in the member states closer together to improve their efficiency.
Seven European initiatives won the European e-Inclusion Awards 2008 for their innovative uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to promote digital and social inclusion in Europe. The winners were announced at the e-Inclusion Ministerial Conference in Vienna (December 1), the concluding event of the Commission’s ‘Be Part of it!’ campaign. And here are the winners:
3. December 2008 – 10:59 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
With the election of Barack Obama the United States will have an administration which by its own words is committed to concept of Open Government. The key principle of Open Government is that as much information about the governments’ activities should be available to the public as possible. The following video explains the concept very well:
The process to governmental openness consists of at least two steps: The first is that information is legally open to citizens. Most commonly this step is undertaken with freedom of information legislation of some sort which is vastly different from country to country and many countries still have not implemented even basic freedom of information. The second step is to make the information actually accessible and provided in a way which is useful to the public. This step may be even harder than the first because it does cover legal, technical and procedural questions at the same time.
These principles seem to be a good basis to further discuss the details related to this subject as for example: What are the technical standards which should be used by government to provide digital information? Should governments actively push information out or should citizens just be able to request information? Is there any information which can rightfully be confidential and if what kind of information would that be?
Openness and accessibility of governmental information is one important factor contributing to a more participatory political cultural and many of the most interesting eParticipation efforts would not be possible without access to this kind of information.
Just found some interesting figures about the number of local authorities in different European countries:
As is increasingly recognised, UK local government already operates on a scale that would prompt most democratic countries to put inverted commas around ‘local’. Our 468 principal local authorities for the 60 million of us equate to an average population of 128,000, or one councillor for every 2,730 residents.
The 60 million French get over half a million councillors in their 36,700 communes alone – one for every 120 of them. The Swedes get one per 200, the Germans one per 420, the Spanish and Italians one per 600, and again these ratios are for only the most local tier in 2- or 3-tier local government systems.
Take away England’s current 34 shire counties – as the Government has already started to – and England’s most local tier of 354 district, borough and unitary councils has an average population of over 140,000. By comparison, the commune/municipality average in France is 1,600, in Spain 5,000, in Germany and Italy about 7,000, and even in recently restructured Denmark about 50,000. (opendemocracy.net)
The author, Chris Game, argues that the plans of the British Government to further enlarge the counties will increase the already perceived democratic deficit. Maybe eGovernment and eParticipation helped to mitigate the consequences?
