Archive for May, 2009
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17. May 2009 – 16:30 by POLITECH
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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/promos/politics/blog/blog-secondlife1.533.jpg
As a following to Politech Institute’s video “Public Actors in Second Life” the persistent online game created by its citizens SECOND LIFE VIDEO, I went back “in world “, rushed to the “search” option, and typed European Elections to see if something were happening there: I didn’t find a lot on that matter, apart from a European citizens group of… 3 people, and a G&L Center, proposing an exhibition about European Elections: links to all Parties’ sites, but not EU ones…
Mainly, most of the regions I went to visit, where Public Institutions have settled, were desperately empty. But I remember that during the French elections, UMP and PS parties had regions and proposed discussion groups and debates. It worked pretty well, with interest from the SL inhabitants with this new eParticipation vector.
To ensure a successful Second Life installation for an Institution, it requires a number of factors and actors:
- A consistent approach with the Second Life world : it needs a good updated computer, time for learning the many tools and tricks, time to meet people and associate with “in-world” known and trusted old timers.
The presence in Second Life also involves the acquisition and maintenance of locations and to pay a monthly fee.
- A well designed project and well managed,
- A rich content, complementary to what is presented in Second Life, opening to the many activities, as eLearning, Culture sites, exhibitions or libraries…
For example, eLearning: a study investigating how the Second Life environment is being used in UK Higher and Further
Education, http://www.eduserv.ac.uk/~/media/foundation/sl/uksnapshot052008/final%20pdf.ashx
or how universities use Second Life to teach complex concepts:
http://www.govtech.com/gt/252550
- An animation by a team in Second Life, with the awareness to captive an audience to a region through new offers, dance balls, freebies and parties… This means the creation of a new kind of job, a professional virtual job…
- An interactive virtual mediation strategy, well defined. It has to be understood that people in SL come and go, have time some moments of their life, then no time. So the public is very varied. It’s not “won “when you have members in a group, it’s a day to day job…
And still has to be a Fun place!
Yes, it’s a lot; an investment in preparation, implementation and like in Real Life, it has a cost, but I believe that the return on investment is interesting, and I will tell you more about it in my next post!
To be continued…
Claire Mercier
Politech Institute
Posted in Tools, Trends | No Comments »
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17. May 2009 – 14:55 by POLITECH
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The e-Participation Action, a three-year initiative of the European Parliament, was launched by the European Commission in 2006.
Its main objective was to close the “Democratic Deficit” of the European Institutions using ICT (Information and Communication Technologies).
21 projects have been co-funded by European Commission. Amongst them a Specific Support Action entitled MOMENTUM (Monitoring, coordinating and promoting the European Union eParticipation projects and initiatives) to monitor, disseminate and provide with a feedback the existing and on ongoing eParticipation projects.
In other words MOMENTUM can be described as the “invisible hand” of
eParticipation Action in Europe. It has grown stronger as a connecting network of ideas, innovations and good practices in Europe.
The various supported projects are using different innovative technologies as visual argumentation (i.e. WAVE http://www.wave-project.eu), ePetition tools (i.e. eMPOWER http://www.ep-empower.eu), Web 2.0 social networking tools
(i.e CitizenScape http://www.citizenscape.org/).
These projects are also tackeling various policy issues from climate change (i.e. U@MareNostrum http://www.uatmarenostrum.eu ) to the EU smoking policy (i.e. Demos@Work http://www.demosatwork.org) or regional issues (i.e. VOICE http://www.give-your-voice.eu and VOICES http://www.give-your-voice.eu).
MOMENTUM enable these projects to collaborate and exchange in the best way as possible, by providing project with information, network of experts and an out-of-the-box global overview of eParticipation.
For more information, please visit: www.ep-momentum.eu
Viktoria Nioradze
Politech Institute
Posted in Projects | 2 Comments »
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17. May 2009 – 14:06 by POLITECH
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http://blog.netzkompetenz.at/wp-content/wir.jpg
“Yes we can” is present as never! But do we really?
The presence on Internet seems to be import. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are in the mouth of everybody.
Which politician can afford it this days to speak over the head of the potential voters?! It seems like this group is becoming a minority.
From a normal user to a high level politician, everybody is discovering the strong side of the social networking in Web 2.0 – and this all over the world. Clobal World!
With the help of Web 2.0 Barack Obama( http://www.barackobama.com/index.php ) became the first black president of America, Moldavia just passed the Twitter Revolution (http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolutionagainst ) against Communism. Even the “sovereign” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_democracy) democrat Dmitri Medwedew opened up a presidential Video Blog (http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/sdocs/vappears.shtml ).
On the other hand the users recognized the power of Social Networks. They want to participate, to express their opinions, but and this is important, they want to see concrete changes and results.
But will Barak Obama be a better president? Will Democracy ever reach Moldavia? Will D. Medwedew ever provide the chance to Russia to be a “Rule of low”? The answers will come over RSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format) 
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Viktoria Nioradze
Politech Institute
Posted in Visions | No Comments »
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12. May 2009 – 09:30 by pol-di.net e.V / politik-digital.de
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Votematch.eu opens with a bold statement: “ Good ideas catch on“, implying that the new online platform, which compares positions of political parties in the European Parliament with one’s own, is indeed such a good idea. The project, which is organised in a joint effort by the Institute for Political Participation (IPP) in the Netherlands and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) in Germany, was launched in June 2008. The educational tool is based on the original method of the Dutch StemWijzer, which reduces the complexity of political party positions to single-sentenced claims and compares one’s own preference with those given by the parties.
Since its first launch, the StemWijzer-method has been copied in the run-up to numerous elections in different EU-member states. “Vote match Europe” now assembles 12 different “Vote Matchers” on one platform and offers thereby a Pan-European overview of the respective national political parties grouped in political factions in the EP. In contrast to the EU-Profiler, the answers to the theses are not generated from the parties’ programs, but individually given and authorized by the parties themselves. This certainly improves the authenticity of the project, yet does not erase the question marks which evolve if political party positions are reduced to one single sentence. After all, Vote Match is still a clickable infotainment tool, which establishes a bridge between young potential voters and the confusing jungle of daily party politics.
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
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8. May 2009 – 11:43 by Renate Mitterhuber
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It’s almost exactly a year ago since I was at the “Neue Verwaltung” (“new administration”) conference in Leipzig and described my impressions here of how eParticipation was faring in Germany’s public administrations. The verdict in a nutshell was: there’s a fair amount on offer to executive staff from German administrations – the conference’s main target group – but the take-up has been pretty slow to date.
Today, even though the year’s still relatively young, the invitations and advance notifications for the major administrative conferences in Germany in 2009 are already fluttering one by one into my inbox. Is eParticipation in all its facets on the agenda more often or in other ways than it was last year? I’ve had a look at the four biggest German eGovernment congresses with that question in mind. After all, that’s where you’re likely to find a throng of representatives – important ones, too – of all of the German administrations, whether at national, federal state or small local authority level.
Let’s start with CeBIT 2009, which took place in early March in Hannover and which 43% of respondents in a survey of representatives of public administrations said was the IT exhibition they visited most. It was certainly interesting to see with my own eyes how, against the backdrop of the financial crisis, the Public Sector Park was experiencing an upturn that the public administration sector itself would never have thought possible, considering how it’s struggled for years to present its services from – to put it diplomatically – a less than favourable corner of the whole CeBIT site.
This year, visitors walked through many of the so-called “business halls”, where there was lots of empty space and exhibitors with plenty of time on their hands, to reach Hall 9, where it was really buzzing. So there was a good audience for a presentation of the eParticipation activities of the German public sector. But you looked in vain for anything from the federal states. The Federal Ministry of the Interior had at least allocated two of the slots in its lecture programme to the subject, each with three talks covering various areas.
I gave a talk there on Hamburg’s experiences in the field (eParticipation in Hamburg from 2002 – 2009: from a pilot project to the norm), while Matthias Trenel from Zebralog e.V. spoke about federal and other administrative discourses. PEP-NET coordinator Rolf Lührs chaired a discussion between leading politicians on the topic of “Politics 2.0” as part of the “Webciety” series.
On 5 – 6 May 2009, the “Neue Verwaltung” congress organised by the dbb-Akademie was due to place again in Leipzig. As last year, it was offering practical workshops on the topic of “Web 2.0 in public administration” and at least dedicating one of nearly 40 lecture slots to the topic of eParticipation. Entitled “eDemocracy, eParticipation and Web 2.0 – online public participation”, it promised to offer representatives of public administrations a chance to find out about new ways (to them) of applying IT. That sounds really promising and gladdens the innovative civil servant’s heart.
On 26 – 27 May 2009, the 12th “Effizente Staat” (“efficient state”) conference will be taking place in Berlin under the banner of “Change Requires Exchange”. According to the organisers, the magazine “Behörden Spiegel”, the event “has become an integral part of the transformation discussion”. If that’s the case, German administrations aren’t transforming themselves in the direction of more eParticipation, since the topic isn’t to be found anywhere.
The fourth major administration conference traditionally takes place in Berlin in the autumn: “Moderne Staat” (“modern state) whose partners include the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the KGSt (Kommunale Gemeinschaftsstelle für Verwaltungsmanagement – a federation of German municipalities and district and local authorities of all sizes concerning local management). According to the advance programme, the main focus in the eGovernment area will be on the topics of “the EU Services Directive” and the “Germany-wide common telephone number for public enquires“.
My personal verdict is that the topic of eParticipation is making up a bit of ground in the public administration community, but its significance lags way behind that of topics such as the “EU Services Directive”, IT infrastructure, IT security, IT cooperation or shared services. These are all doubtless important topics when it comes to being well equipped for the future.
Does the dominance of the classical IT topics perhaps have to do with the fact that “the internal IT departments in local authorities (…) frequently tend to fulfil the role of a simple operator, exerting little influence on how departments actually use IT”? This is what emerged from a survey conducted by the market research and consultancy company IDC in the autumn of 2008 among those responsible for IT in metropolitan authorities and rural administrative districts. They add: “In future, however, IT will become even more important for the successful structuring of administrative processes and a greater responsiveness to the needs of the public”. It is to be hoped that the message will not fall on deaf ears and that it will be given enough space.
Posted in Trends | 1 Comment »
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5. May 2009 – 10:33 by E-Voting.CC
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Finally our newest project has been released and delivered to our readers: The biannual free special 
interest magazine “Modern Democracy” by E-Voting.CC.
As I have announced in an earlier entry we issued the first edition of our magazine dealing with selected topics in the field of E-Democracy and it’s newest developments. The magazine is distributed all around the world.
Before I give you a quick overview of the contents, I want to thank all of you who have mailed us the registration coupons. The responses were overwhelmingly positive and gave us the affirmation that such a magazine is needed and wanted. Thank you for all the positive feedback!
The first article deals with the upcoming student union elections in Austria. This event will mark the entry of Austria into the list of countries with legally binding electronic elections. Students will be able to cast their vote via Internet from May 18th until May 22nd – one week before the paper election. The results will be counted after the last polling stations are closed.
The intention behind this project is to give every student an easy and uncomplicated way of participating in these biannual elections and to innovate the Austrian voting procedures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Interview, News, Projects, Trends, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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4. May 2009 – 09:07 by Centre for E-Government
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The Obama campaign, the US election cycle and the role of the media/youtube was one of the big topics discussed at the eParticipation Day in Brussels on 4. March 2008.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst hosted the conference “YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States” shortly after (16-17 April) and the speaker presentations are now available online:
Posted in News | No Comments »
