Archive for February, 2009
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9. February 2009 – 18:50 by Rolf Luehrs
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How can we be sure that the online discussion will not be biased or manipulated by certain interest groups?
Online discourses mirror the world as it is and should not be misunderstood as an ideal or protected room where only the Habermasian “forceless force of the better argument” counts. Participants are part of this world and thus often argue from a specific perspective, defending their own particular interests. To this end, the only way of preventing a biased discussion is to ensure that all the different interests are present. A heterogeneously structured community is crucial.
The only thing the majority of the participants need to have in common is the belief that discussing the respective issue online is worth the effort. If this is the case, it becomes quite hard to manipulate the discussion because a kind of immune system emerges. And this system tolerates neither simple propaganda nor obvious manipulation.
What may sound like wishful thinking or esoteric beliefs relies on a simply explained mechanism. Just imagine that you have already invested several hours or even days pointing out your arguments and convincing other participants. What would you think about others rushing into the discussion just to say something like, “this discussion is useless, stop arguing”, or posting something that appears to have been copied and pasted from a press release and does not refer to anything that has already been discussed? You would probably feel annoyed and disrespected. And that is exactly what we have observed in so many of our discussions. Other participants criticised this behaviour even before the moderators could intervene.
If participants want to make their point in a lively discussion with many committed participants, their only resource is their arguments. That requires time and energy and if they make that commitment, any manipulative intention turns into more or less constructive contributions to the discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
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5. February 2009 – 13:53 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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A while ago the possibilities of Change.gov were discussed on this weblog and right at noon on January 20th the new White House website was launched. Both websites show a spirit of openness and the goal of the new US administration to get citizens more involved into the political process. There has been intense debate over whether these sites were open enough or if WhiteHouse.gov was just a small step to Web1.5. But among this entire discussion one thing seem to be implicit: The Democrats just better than the Republicans at working in the medium internet. Now the website of the Congress Republicans has been re-launched and its look and features seem to indicate that the conservatives try to catch up to the modern web presence already embraced by the Democrats.
Read the rest of this entry »
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3. February 2009 – 15:07 by Dan Jellinek
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As most readers of this blog will know, the European elections this year are in early June (precise dates vary from country to country: the UK and the Netherlands is voting on 4 June but most if not all the other nations on 7 June).
Fraser’s post about the ‘bug’ campaign to encourage people to vote in the forthcoming European elections was interesting and looks to be a valuable project.
I’ve been wondering whether there is much else going on online around these elections?
With national elections recently there have been major stories about internet campaigning and innovation, such as Barack Obama’s cutting edge campaign, or in Europe the French Presidential race not so long ago.
With MEPs, I don’t remember hearing many stories about web campaigning.
You can find out links to information on MEPs by country at:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members.do
but this does not include links to their individual websites.
There has also been an electronic petitions service launched recently: EuroPetition (fledgling website at http://www.europetition.eu/ though this has yet to be populated in many areas). Running at local and international levels, the project intends to boost engagement with MEPs, but is not specifically linked to the elections as far as I know.
(for slightly more about it see my own blog post at
http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=190 ).
So this blog post is a call for responses – has anyone heard of or seen any online campaigning innovation this year by MEP candidates?
Thanks,
Dan Jellinek
www.headstar.com
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
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3. February 2009 – 10:14 by Centre for E-Government
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I have arranged a PEP-NET workshop at the EDEM 2009, Vienna 7-8 September, the preliminary title is:
PEP-NET:an e-Participation Network for European Practitioners
This is an opportunity not only to present PEP-NET to the all the participants, but also to lead a disussion about a number of e-participation topics.
At the moment everything is open, so I would be glad to hear your opinions on the topics to focus on as well as the title of the workshop. Further info about the EDEM 2009: http://www.ocg.at/edem2009/index.html
Noella
Posted in TuTech | 5 Comments »
