Archive for April, 2009
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22. April 2009 – 16:57 by Roberto Zarro
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Wednesday the 8th of April the Emilia-Romagna Region, with the partnership of Pep-Net and the scientific collaboration of the University of Bergamo, organised the international seminar “E-democracy 2.0: Institutions, citizens and new networks: a potential lexicon”. Around 200 people were present to the event, which was really interesting for the quality of thoughts and suggestions brought from the speakers. A summary of the many themes discussed during the day (in italian version) and all papers and slides presented by the speakers are on line on the website of Partecipa.net, the e-democracy project promoted by the Emilia-Romagna Region (www.partecipa.net). Here we just try to take a shot of the main themes issued from the conversation among academics, experts, practitioners and simple “fan” of the e-participation.
Summarising at the maximum level, two great issues came out from the seminar. The first concerns e-participation: there were really great expectations about this concept at the beginning of the Internet revolution; furthermore these expectations were hardly cooled by the events; but now, with the web 2.0 explosion and the Barack Obama’s digital exploit already echoing from overseas, the term e-participation seems not only “trendly” again, but also much more than just a good claim.
The second evidence is that if blogs, social networks, peer to peer and so on really propelled the hopes of people who trust the e-participation perspective, the e-democracy idea – and with the term we mean here the direct use of the nets by the institutions to enrich and enlarge decisional processes, especially in the local contexts – is at the moment not so “trendy” or expanding. It’s obvious that where people work hard, and public institutions are really interested by the potential of e-democracy, some good results can be obtained. This issued for instance by the interventions of Rolf Luehrs, Pep-Net’s coordinator, and Sabrina Franceschini, manager of the Emilia-Romagna Region’s e-democracy projects. At the same time anyway, nobody can deny that the web 2.0 wave swamped the “e-democracy little island”, and that institutions seems now really unsettled about the role they can really play in an universe, the Net, that becomes everyday more open, horizontal and participative.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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22. April 2009 – 09:47 by ASAEL
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ASAEL (Asociación Aragonesa de Entidades Locales), está desarrollando el proyecto “eCLAU” aprobado dentro del marco del Programa Europeo “Jóvenes en Acción”, cuya finalidad principal es la de potenciar la participación de los jóvenes a través de las Nuevas Tecnologías en la política medioambiental de la UE, en concreto en la lucha contra el cambio climático.
El Proyecto se promueve desde ASAEL, teniendo como socios participantes a Entidades Griegas, italianas, Francesas y Búlgaras, lo que fomentará el intercambio de opiniones entre los jóvenes de los diferentes países de la UE en un tema de gran actualidad como es el de la lucha contra el cambio climático.
El Proyecto eCLAU tiene como objetivos, atraer y concienciar a los jóvenes sobre las políticas medioambientales llevadas a cabo en la UE.; acercar a los jóvenes al sistema democrático y potenciar su participación en el mismo a través de las Nuevas Tecnologías; involucrar en mayor medida a las Autoridades Locales y Regionales en el proceso democrático y su implicación en las políticas medioambientales y a las Asociaciones de jóvenes y otros actores sociales; fomentar el intercambio de opiniones entre los jóvenes de los diferentes países de la UE en un tema de amplia participación y actualidad como es el de la lucha contra el cambio climático.
El Cambio Climático es un desafío que nos concierne a todos y que no tiene fronteras, por lo que requiere soluciones transnacionales. La Unión Europea ha demostrado que está dispuesta a asumir su liderazgo a la hora de afrontar el cambio climático, llevando a cabo un modelo de producción de energía segura, sostenible y competitiva y tomando la Economía Europea como modelo de desarrollo sostenible en el siglo XXI. Estas medidas de la Unión Europea casi no llegan al ciudadano, por lo que el objetivo del Proyecto consistirá en involucrar en los procesos de participación a asociaciones, autoridades locales y regionales y como destinatarios finales, a los jóvenes.
Además de las Jornadas, el Proyecto engloba también otras acciones de difusión como la edición de una revista y la realización de una Reunión Internacional en Zaragoza y todo ello tendrá como núcleo principal la creación de una página web interactiva que promocione la participación ciudadana. El Proyecto persigue dos aspectos fundamentales: por un lado proporcionará información de los resultados conseguidos en materia medioambiental por la UE y por otro pretende provocar una reacción a través de la participación activa en la utilización de las TIC. Permitirá el acceso a foros nacionales e internacionales donde se incentivará la participación activa de los ciudadanos.
Para la consecución del proyecto se tiene previsto realizar el próximo día 29 de abril unas Jornadas con el título “Participación de los Jóvenes en Europa: Luchando Juntos contra el Cambio Climático”. Pretende además, acercar a los jóvenes al sistema democrático europeo promoviendo su participación en los procesos democráticos a través de las TIC y en concreto en el uso de los foros. En ella van a participar aspectos de las tres áreas principales del Proyecto: Medio Ambiente, Jóvenes y Participación, con lo que esperamos obtener un rico intercambio y debate de ideas que contribuyan al desarrollo de las acciones del mismo.
Por lo tanto la herramienta fundamental del Proyecto será la página web ya que fomentará y potenciará la participación de los jóvenes a través de foros de debate, noticias, encuestas, transferencias de buenas prácticas, publicación de resultados etc. (para más información y participación en los foros www.e-clau.net)
Posted in good practice, members, Projects, TuTech | No Comments »
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22. April 2009 – 09:38 by ASAEL
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ASAEL (Aragonese Association of Local Authorities), is developing the “eCLAU” Project in the framework of “Youth in Action” European Programme, which principal aim is to promote youth participation within the utilization of New Technologies in the UE environmental policy, specifically in the fight against climatic change.
The Project is being promoted from ASAEL, involving other partners from different UE countries like Greece, Italy, France and Bulgaria, promoting the exchange of opinions between young people from different countries of the EU, concerning a topical subject of high participation as the fight against the climate change
The eCLAU project tries to reach the next goals: to bring and aware young people to the environmental politics achieved by EU; to bring young people the democratic system closer and foster their participation through the new Technologies; to involve the local and regional authorities into the democratic process and into environmental politics and do the same with youth associations and other social actors and finally as mentioned, to promote the exchange of opinions between young people from different countries of the EU.
Climate change is a challenge which concerns all of us and which does not stop at national borders and thus requires transnational solutions. The European Union has shown that it is ready to assume global leadership in tackling climate change, in facing the challenge of secure, sustainable and competitive energy production and in making the European economy a model for sustainable development in the XXI century. However, its action hardly reaches through to citizens. Indeed, technology, research and politics will be core elements for tackling climate change. But to ensure its success for young people, civil society organizations and local authorities have to be involved to a higher degree in the political process.
Besides the workshops the Project includes other different dissemination campaigns through the publication of a magazine and an International meeting in Zaragoza, these actions will converge in the creation of an interactive page web, promoting e-participation. eCLAU project follows two senses: on the one hand, it will give information about the results achieved by EU policies in the sustainable development field and on the other hand it will have a feedback through active participation using ICT. It will allow the access to national and international on line forums encouraging citizen participation.
For its achievement we will start next 29th of April with a first conference-workshop named “Youth Participation in Europe: Fighting together against the Climatic Change”. It pretends to bring EU closer to youth and to improve their role within the democratic system of the EU using ICT specifically the participation in the forums. It will be focused in the 3 main areas of the Project: Environment, Youth and eParticipation, and we aim to achieve a rich exchange of debates and opinions that will contribute to the development of it.
Therefore the basic tool of the Project will be the website as will foster youth participation through the on line forums, news, polls, good practice and exchange of experience and results disseminations. (for more information and participation into the forums www.e-clau.net)
Posted in good practice, members, Projects, TuTech | 1 Comment »
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21. April 2009 – 09:46 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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The rise of social media and social networking as part of it brought both advantages and problems to eParticipation projects. On the one hand online time is limited for each potential participant of an eParticipation effort, which means the more time a person spends on Facebook, Twitter etc. the less time will be available for the eParticipation project. On the other hand social media has gone mainstream, which means that even more people are used to publishing their thoughts and opinions online, which in turn may also help to get people involved in eParticipation. It is not significant whether one or the other force is stronger as eParticipation projects need to find their audience where it is already active on the web. Keeping this point in mind the following information on the fastest growing social sites can help to plan and organize an online campaign to recruit participants for eParticipation projects.
Mashable.com regularly looks into the growth and development of social sites. They have identified the fastest growing social sites and also points out some trends besides the raw numbers. Facebook and Twitter are still growing at enormous rates. The year-over-year growth of Twitter in March 09 was more than 2.500 percent. Facebook attracted almost 70 million visitors in March alone.
Besides these top players the social network of social networks Ning is believed to be the second fastest growing social networking site, with now more than one million individual networks on it. Its traffic grew 283 percent year-over-year. On the business end of the spectrum LinkedIn reaches 15.8 Million people in the US where it the third largest network behind Myspace and Facebook. The full report can be viewed on the Mashable.com site.
Two of the named networks seem to be of special interest for eParticipation projects. The massive growth of Twitter and the fact that the rich ecosystem surrounding it allows for novel and targeted actions makes it an interesting choice for an online campaign. The online discourse about the Future of the University of Hamburg tries to make use of this potential. The second one would be Ning. This site is not one social network but a platform which allows users to setup their own ones. Therefore Ning hosts networks about almost any topic or set of persons. This circumstance can be used to directly address certain target and interest groups. Examples would be networks on Sustainable Urban Development or government related ones like govloop.
In summary social media sites should be part of the online campaigns done to attract participants to eParticipation projects and allow for targeted actions on a topic or regional basis.
Posted in Trends | 3 Comments »
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20. April 2009 – 13:44 by Danish Technological Institute
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by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Danish Technological Institute
Much has been reported about the successful campaigning, fund raising and support canvassing by the 2008 Obama election campaign. Still the use of ICT to increase electoral participation, campaigning, consultation and voting is not a uniquely US phenomena. A multitude of eParticipation and eDemocracy initiatives exist. Ranging from eVoting in Estonia’s and Geneva’s national and regional elections, gender budgeting in Freiburg, consultation on local issues in Malmö to the political influence of bloggers in China or in the 2008 election crisis in Kenya. Information communication technology (ICT) in other words plays an increasingly important role in society.
As South Africans go to the polling stations on 22 April 2009, campaigning is being played out in traditional media (TV, radio, print), on the internet, on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, in text messages/sms’s with street banners and in rallies across the country.
A full 173 parties – 134 at national level plus 39 purely provincial parties – are officially registered for the 2009 elections. Of these the four main ones are (alphabetic order):
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ANC – African National Congress and currently in power with the support, in a tripartite alliance, of the smaller South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
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COPE – Congress of the People in 2008 by formed members of the ANC
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DA – Democratic Alliance and currently the official opposition
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IFP – Inkatha Freedom Party a mainly regional party centered on the province of KwaZulu-Natal
Each of the main parties makes use of ICT in some form and in variety of ways and degrees. The table below outlines the use of websites and social networks (or Web2.0 technologies). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in News, Tools, Trends, Visions | 6 Comments »
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15. April 2009 – 09:39 by Centre for E-Government
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CALL FOR PAPERS EDEM09 http://edem2009.ocg.at/
2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy
7.-8.9.2009 University of Economics and Business Administration Vienna, Austria
Submissions deadline: 17 May 2009 Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in members, News, TuTech | No Comments »
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14. April 2009 – 09:53 by CTI
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Democratic societies of today face the challenge of upgrading public dialogue and reinforcing citizens’ participation in decision making, thus passing from an e-government to an e-governance model. eVoting is an important aspect of this effort, while at the same time is one of the most controversial issues at a technological, political and social level. A basic precondition for the maturity and acceptance of eVoting systems is the establishment of trust for their users. Read the rest of this entry »
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12. April 2009 – 10:49 by Fraser Henderson - ICELE
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We all know about the benefits of social networking but what about the pitfalls? The obvious one is distraction – it is estimated that social networks cost UK businesses £6.5 billion a year in lost productivity. That doesn’t mean I’m in favour of blacklisting such sites; instead I would encourage corporations and public bodies to update their IT ‘acceptable use’ policies accordingly.
However, there are more sinister forces at work. The idea of being ‘friends’ with somebody you haven’t met might be good for kudos but can you be confident of their identity? Trust is an old online problem with worryingly few checks and balances in the social networking field.
I’ve observed that people are generally less alert in these environments too – for example, more likely to click a link in a Twitter feed than in an email. I don’t think people realise that social networking accounts are increasingly attractive to scammers and hackers. For example, when Obama’s Twitter account was hacked at the start of the year it offered the perfect springboard for spam.
The nature of the beast is also the problem. Twitter is a prime example – it has an upper character limit so people tend to use short URL generators like TinyURL. This makes it easier to cloak your final destination. Facebook, on the other hand, allows ‘non-certified’ applications to be installed and as a result many have fallen foul to malicious widgets. [Firefox users’ note: there is an excellent add-on called LongURL mobile expander which can be used to reveal the final destination of web redirectors].
An experiment by IT security firm Sophos tested the integrity of Facebook users back in 2007. After setting up a profile in the name of “Freddi Staur” (an anagram of ‘Fraudster’, pictured here), they sent out 200 friend requests and waited to see what would happen. A total of 87 people responded and of these 82 leaked ‘personal’ information such as full dates of birth.
In addition to these findings, Sophos ‘poked’ a further 100 random Facebook users to see if this form of communication would elicit the same response and encourage people to let Freddi access their details. However, just eight people responded, with only five revealing personal information.
With increasing scope for security lapses in eParticipation land, PEP-NET should take note.
Posted in good practice, Trends, Visions | 3 Comments »
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8. April 2009 – 23:55 by Civil College
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The USA is having a hot period of reforming the government through web2.0 and participatory models – it has become quite obvious during the last times. It does also mean, that NGO’s are helping to find the best policy through various means.
The leader of IT and transparency mashups, the Sunlight Foundation’s president, Elen Miller has collected the results in the official SunlightFoundationBlog of the mentioned Government2.0 Camp, which has been held in a Barcampstyle.
The video and the 10 points can be found below – the post is here!
Ten Measures for Transparency Success from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.
1. Open data: The federal government should make all data searchable, findable and accessible.
2. Disclose spending data: The government should disclose how it is spending taxpayer dollars, who is spending it and how it’s being spent.
3. Procurement data: How does the government decide where the money is getting spent, who gets it, how they are spending it and how can we measure success.
4. Open portal for public request for information: There should be a central repository for all Freedom of Information Act requests that are public to that people can see in real time when the requests come in, how fast the government responds to them.
5. Distributed data: The government should make sure it builds redundancy in their system so that data is not held in just one location, but held in multiple places in case of a disaster, terrorist attack or some other reason where the data is damaged. Redundancy would guarantee government could rebuild the data for future use.
6. Open meetings: Government meetings should be open to the public so that citizens can tell who is trying to influence government. All schedules should be published as soon as they happen so that people can see who is meeting with whom and who is trying to influence whom.
7. Open government research: Currently, when government conducts research, it usually does not report the data it collects until the project is finished. Government should report its research data while its being collected in beta form. This would be a measure of transparency and would change the relationship that people have to government research as it is being collected.
8. Collection transparency: Government should disclose how it is collecting information, for whom are they collecting the data, and why is it relevant. The public should have the ability to judge whether or not it valuable to them, and giving them the ability to comment on it.
9. Allowing the public to speak directly to the president: Recently, we saw the president participate in something called “Open for Questions,” where he gave the public access to ask questions. This allowed him to burst his bubble and be in touch with the American public directly is another measure of transparency.
10. Searchable, crawl able and accessible data: If the government were to make all data searchable, crawl able and accessible we would go along way in realizing all the goals presented at the Gov 2.0 Camp.
I have to say, this is for the USA. But how about the EU?
What do we have from here? I assume, not much – the recently adopted transparency initiative is really weak – this means, that there is a significant need to have an entity, that draws the light into data formats, standardization and citizen requirements. In this continent, this is a hard stuff. Since we have many organizations, from Mysociety to Transparency International, and the cooperation, the common project developments has just been started recently.
But how do we feel inside ourselves, as a group of people, who already know, how important transparency is for real e-participation?
What kind of transparency do the e-participation players require here- keeping in mind, that real, non-e and e-participation can only based on real and accurate information- the basis of accountability and transparency.
(get some inspiration at http://www.sunlightlabs.com/ , EU related issue here, Transparency on Euractive)
Betöltés…
Posted in News, Trends, Visions | No Comments »
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8. April 2009 – 09:37 by Centre for E-Government
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Workshop „ePolicy-Making“: legal requirements, preconditions, solutions.
Join us for 2-day workshop (please note: in German!) with Austrian eGovernment experts at the Danube University Krems, 7 and 8 May 2009.
Special rate for PEP-NET Members and Associates (75EUR)
More information: http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/egov/symposium
Posted in TuTech | No Comments »
