Archive for February, 2010
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28. February 2010 – 22:29 by Asociacion Ciudades Kyosei / Pedro Prieto-Martin
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For those of you that read Spanish, the report that the Asociación Ciudades Kyosei just released (which can be downloaded from its website) could interest you much, as understanding “Citizen Participation” continues to be the basis to developing any “e-Participation” initiative.
The text “(e)Participación en el ámbito local. Caminando hacia una democracia colaborativa” deals with citizen participation as it was known during the XX Century.
It analyses its strengths, potential and problems from a critical, irreverent, but nevertheless thoughtful perspective. To illustrate the characteristics of citizen participation, the report provides a comprehensive and original analysis of Participatory Budgeting Experiences of the big brazilian cities (with special emphasis on Porto Alegre and Fortaleza).
Vicious cycle of participation
Based on this understanding of traditional Citizen Participation, the upcoming chapters of the report will be able to reflect on the “Participation of the twenty-first century”: our beloved “e-Participation”.
This text was prizewinner in the last CLAD Congress (the most important Latin-American congress on State Reform and Public Administration Modernization), which took place in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil).
We really expect you will find this report refreshing, and actually hope it will foster interesting reflections from your side.
Posted in Visions | 3 Comments »
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26. February 2010 – 10:32 by E-Voting.CC
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Today, on Friday 26th of February, the extended deadline for paper submission for the EVOTE2010 conference is due! The last chance to submit you scientific papers and participate in our renowned issue of our fourth issue of the International Conference on E-Voting – EVOTE2010.
The conference will take place from July 21st to July 24th in Bregenz at the beautiful lake Constance.
We are looking forward to another highly international and very interesting event!
Daniel Botz – E-Voting.CC
Posted in Events, News, Projects, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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25. February 2010 – 10:20 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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The idea of using the distributed web (Blogs, Twitter etc.) as a tool to identify opinions and feed them into decision making processes has been discussed on this blog before. In a recent article I also tried to suggest a rather crude tool to gather these kinds of distributed opinions using of the shelf web tools. The ThinkTank open source project by Gina Trapani and recently Expert Labs takes this idea to a whole new level in three ways:
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The project started out as a tool to just gather Twitter data and back it up on another server but has since developed into a much larger and more ambitious web app that is able to gather activity related to a specific person or subject from existing social networks and organize this information in a useful fashion. ThinkTank stores all data it gathers in its own database, which makes analysis, filtering and documentation much easier.
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One use of ThinkTank, which is especially suiting for political participation processes, is that it allows to gather the distributed answers posted to a a specific question on many different social networks. Gina Trapani uses the following example to illustrate the power of this ability: When she decided to buy a Netbook she asked her Twitter followers what the best model etc. is and got over 240 qualified results. „ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses.“
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Recently Expert Labs, a non-profit independent organisation which tries to „help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens“, has hired Gina Trapani as a project director to work on ThinkTank as a tool in a political context. The idea is to empower politicians and administrative policy makers to make use of the distributed knowledge and expertise represented by citizens in various social networks. In other words: Like Gina was able to ask her savvy Twitter followers about the best Netbook, politicians should be able to ask about the best policy decision and be able to make sense of the answers.
The first test for ThinkTank in the political context will be Grant Challenges initiative by the White House. The tool will be used to gather feedback on the list of scientific and technical challenges identified by the White House. It will be interesting to see how this still rather young open source project hold up to the task but it is great to see that the White House and Expert Labs are willing to make use of such an innovative tool for a real-life test.
Posted in Tools, Trends | No Comments »
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16. February 2010 – 17:16 by Centre for E-Government
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When talking of digital natives and the new generation, names and definitions are changing rapidly. Thoughts on today’s Generation Z and the differences between Austria and the U.S.
The Baby Busters
Generation X, (often also named the 13thGeneration or Baby Busters/Baby Boomers) was shaped by political experiences such as the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin wall and defined as those born after the baby boom ended (birth dates 1961 to 1981). They are characterised by being the first generation with widespread access to television and shaped by the attention they received from the media. The term was used in a wide range of fields from social sciences to popular culture. It was popularised by the author Douglas Coupland in the novel “Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture” (1991).
The Millenial Generation
The demographic cohort following Generation X is – surprisingly enough – described as Generation Y. It is also called Millennial Generation, Net Generation or Echo Boomers. Many sources have Generation Y spanning from the 1970s (during the late years of the Vietnam war) to the late 1990s, others between 1980 and 2000 (cf. Tim Walters, Ph.D. from Forrester Research). Characteristics of this generation vary, depending on region and social conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use of communication media and digital technologies. Shaped by the events of its time and the rise of communication technologies, it’s members, who have not yet hit 30, are familiar with almost all aspects of the internet, websites like YouTube and social networking sites. This may explain why they are rather peer-oriented due to the easy use of communication through technology. Compared to their elders, they seem to have a very different social behaviour and are often seen as spoiled children who demand good salary conditions and best time to work.
Participation vs. Command-and-Control
When conducting a survey with Swedish youngsters via Internet and Facebook (report entitle e-revolution), PricewaterhouseCoopers found out that collaboration and participation are not just words and that this generation is one of the most innovative. Attitudes and opinions are formed through the net, young people having a clear vision of it’s role. Generation Y strongly influenced the U.S. presidential election in 2008. 71% of those under 30 years went to the polls for the first time and two-thirds voted for Barack Obama. With a “speak your mind” philosophy, they are much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management and don’t fear authorities. Plus, work-life balance is becoming increasingly important.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
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16. February 2010 – 15:42 by Danish Technological Institute
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For those of you who are not yet aware: The call for papers for the 2nd International Conference on eParticipation 2010 (ePart 2010 www.demo-net.org/epart) is now open.
ePart 2010 will take place 29 August to 2 September in Lausanne (CH). ePart is co-organised with EGOV 2010 conference so a chance to meet colleagues and peers in both fields.
ePart 2010 covers a whole range of research topics within area of eParticipation. The principal aim is to review research advances in both social and technological scientific domains, seeking to demonstrate new concepts, methods and styles of eParticipation.
ePart 2010 will in particular focuses on:
- The research landscape, directions and foundations
- Research methods, method integration and techniques
- Cultural and normative differences in eParticipation
- Comparative analyses of eParticipation practices
- eParticipation projects: design, implementation, evaluation, quality and impact
- Technologies for eParticipation, policy modelling, simulation and visualisation
- Online conversation and deliberation, eConsulation, ePoling, eLegislation, eElectioneering, eVoting, Social networking
- Education, training courses, and curricula
ePart 2010 papers submission – in line with the above focus areas – will be allowed in four distinct types of submissions:
- Completed research papers
- Ongoing research and innovative projects
- Workshops and panels on pertinent issues
- PhD colloquium submission.
ePart is closely aligned with EGOV 2010 – the IFIP eGovernment conference and the EGOV community. Note that this year both conferences will be located for the first time outside the DEXA cluster of conferences. ePart 2010 is sponsored by IFIP, WG8.5.
Important Dates
- Submission of papers: 3 March 2010
- Submission of workshop/panel proposals: 15 March 2010
- Submissions to PhD colloquium: 15 March 2010
- Notification of acceptance for papers: 30 March 2010
- Notification of acceptance for workshops/panels: 30 April 2010
Publication
All accepted completed research papers will be published by Springer LNCS. Ongoing research and innovation projects papers will be published by Trauner Druck. Outstanding research papers from the conference might be selected for further development and publication in a special issue of a relevant journal.
Conference chairs
- Ann Macintosh, The University of Leeds (UK)
- Efthimios Tambouris, University of Macedonia (GR)
- Olivier Glassey, IDHEAP- University of Lausanne (CH)
BY Danish Technological Institute/Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Posted in Events, inclusion, News, Projects, Trends, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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16. February 2010 – 15:01 by E-Voting.CC
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In response to the large number of requests from the community, the organizing committee of the 4th Electronic Voting Conference EVOTE2010 decided to extend the deadline for submission of papers by two weeks from Friday February 12 to Friday February 26, 2010.
Please find further information, templates and the call for papers here.
I hope this helps to finish your papers in time!
Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC
Posted in members, News, Projects | No Comments »
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14. February 2010 – 12:13 by Francesco Molinari
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I have just come back from an intensive 2-day workshop in Barcelona, beautifully organised and managed by QeC-ERAN – a Brussels based network of cities once affected by socio-economic breakdown – under the umbrella of a EU-funded initiative entitled Local Forums for Developing Participatory Democracy (link). The workshop aimed at highlighting the potential of multimedia tools to enhance political participation of young adults (18-30) and raise awareness of their fundamental rights and responsibilities as citizens of the Union. A notable number of young people came in from the various partner cities (the countries represented were Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and the UK). Several EU-level experiences were presented, including PEP-NET 
and a Twitter based discussion entitled Why vote?. Sound evidence was shown regarding the creation of several Local Forums at the various partners’ locations in order to bring together ideas, make innovative experiments with multimedia tools and build new expertise to be shared internationally. An online community of practice is now being setup to further make the promotion of participatory democracy to young people more sustainable at local/regional level. Proposed instruments to facilitate the community: chat, instant messaging, whiteboard and discussion tables; voting and survey tools; document sharing facilities such as googledocs and a wiki to write together and produce text with shared visions. My comment: I spotted a lot of ingenious creativity and serious engagement in these people. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. Worth a second look soon.
Posted in Events, good practice, Projects | No Comments »
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11. February 2010 – 14:55 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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In a recent post I argued that it is very promising to look at the distributed opinion expressed by people on the internet in eParticipation and other projects. One of the major challenges in doing so is to be able to know which of the many statements one can found all over the web have been made by the same person. The Social Graph helps to overcome this problem.
A Social Graph includes all the websites and relationships between websites related to any particular web user. The Social Graph for me would for example state that I am an author on the PEP-NET weblog, my Twitter account is twitter.com/bengtfeil, my Facebook name is bengtfeil and so own. The Social Graph also includes information on the people related to me as friends on the different sites. Of course only publicly viewable information can by included into the graph.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Tools, Trends | 1 Comment »
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11. February 2010 – 10:57 by Danish Technological Institute
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Live streaming of the “Making Europe more democratic?” debate on Thursday 11 February @ 14:00 CET at http://europa.steiermark.at/stream
The debate aim to answer an array of questions relevant to democracy and surrounding the new European Citizens’ Initiative. The event will be hosted by Richard MEDI?, European Media and Communications Expert (former AER Spokesman).
The main speakers include: Sebastian KURPAS, a representative from the European Commission and Johannes W. PICHLER, Professor for European Law at the University of Graz and Director of the Austrian Institute for European Law and Politics in Salzburg (AT).
The initiative is part of the “AER Communications Atelier” under the new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) the Steiermark Office Brussels will be hosted by the AER (Assembly of European Regions). It is also the first time the “AER Communications Atelier” gives interested parties the opportunity to follow the discussion as a live-stream and to participate actively in the discussion on http://europa.steiermark.at/stream
Danish Technological Institute/Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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10. February 2010 – 21:11 by Julia Glidden
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I have spent the day running user groups for an interesting new argument visualisation tool that is designed to make it easier for citizens to participate in policy making on climate change. Check out the new EU-funded project: www.jointhewave.org
Aside from learning some very interesting things about how easily eParticipation practioners fall into assuming prior knowledge (such as asking people what they think about the ‘platform’ or ‘argument visualisation’ when most people don’t know what either of these terms mean!), I also learned something very discouraging about the present state of the climate change debate. One things is for certain – the present fall out among climate change researchers and flurry of media coverage surrounding it is taking a toll that not even the most innovative of social media tools can alleviate.
Anyone familiar with acedemia will recognise the current academic dispute surroung climate change research. It is a sad and familar tale of petty jealousies and turf wars in which researchers conspire to block dissent and promote a self-selected clique. This type of behaviour happens all the time in universities around the world.
Unfortunately, while the researchers conspire to one up each other, average citizens are left dazed and confused about what, if anything, they should do to address climate change. Should they really cut back on the family budget to fund higher environmental taxes? Give up on the car? Cancel the family holiday in Spain? Live with that wind farm down the road?
Henry Kissinger once famously commented ‘The disputes in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low.’ In this instance, alas, the stakes are not low at all.
It is truly unfortunate that while the so-called scientific experts squabble, the pressing interests and needs of average people are left unanswered. There are enough valid concerns about the various methods being proposed to help save the planet without unnecessary doubt and obsfucation being thrown into the debate by quarreling academics.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
