ICT Today - still fare away from “global agora” 3. May 2010 – 10:02 by echo source

The idea of creating a global agora through the use of ICT is at least as old as the Internet itself [1]. However, it took thirty years after the birth of this vision in the early 1970s to establish a broadly used global interactive medium. This development has been brought by the new wave of Web2.0 applications in the recent years. Interfaces became more dynamic and easier to use, user-generated multimedia content became common and internet-access spread throughout the world. However, a closer look at the tools of today´s social media reveals a lack of essential functional development. We still communicate mainly through E-mail and discuss in forums – both technologies dating back to the very beginning of the Internet. Even chats and wikis have not changed substantially since the last ten years. As a matter of fact, there are no tools at all, which could enable a truly solution-oriented, democratic mass collaboration.

In this sense, what we call Web2.0 is the process of socio-cultural adoption and re-appropriation of interactive tools, which are actually quite old – and this socio-cultural appropriation has been driven by civil society, not by governments.

It is not just that we are far from having reached the maximum of technological possibilities in creating effective tools for eParticipation – most of the tools eParticipation is using were not even made with this purpose. Thus, the fact, that civil society uses social media much more efficiently than governments do, is not very surprising. Neither is the fact that today´s eParticipation projects suffer from a negative correlation between the number of participants and their chance to actively participate.

„The greater the number of people targeted in an eParticipation initiative, the more general this initiative usually is, employing one-way communication. On the other hand, the fewer the people targeted in an eParticipation initiative, the more specific this initiative may be, allowing more active participation and more specific outcomes. [...] Hence, if eParticipation is visualised as a means for involving the millions of European citizens with the aim to jointly shape policies and influence decision-making, then current reality shows that Europe today is far away from this target“ [2].

Clearly, we did not achieve to develop tools for large-scale democratic collaboration. Instead we keep on using forums for discussions (which do not provide any structured results) and try to co-create texts in wikis (which do not provide any democratic process for content control - e.g. Wikipedia did work quite well as an encyclopaedia. But it uses a meritocratic, and thus undemocratic regime for content control, which is actually the reason for its current problems). Both tools are not scalable, and therefore not apt for constructive mass-collaboration.

To cope with this democratic deficit and the limitations of these tools, most of the more successful eParticipation projects employ moderated forums intensively. This model works quite well for eConsultations in limited regional scales like cities. However, it is not applicable for large-scale participation. Furthermore moderation is expensive and therefore limited to a certain period of time. In practice this means, that in the very moment a citizens is confronted with a certain problem, normally there is still no platform where she could discuss her own concerns or participate in related decisions. As a result, motivation to participate is limited to the few citizens who accidentally are interested in one of the issues being dealt with during the consultation. But the great majority of the citizens will always be interested in other issues (mainly those that are relevant in their own everyday life) and thus not be motivated to participate. To make eParticipation apt for mass collaboration on the European level, an open space for deliberation, debate and decision-making has to be established, allowing citizens to come up with their problems and suggestions whenever they want. Therefore new tools have to be developed providing structured debate and co-editing for huge numbers of participants.

[1] Castells, M. 2005: Die Internet-Galaxie: Internet, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Berlin

[2] Panopoulou E., Tambouris E., Tarabanis K. 2009: eParticipation initiatives: How is Europe progressing?, European Journal of ePractice, No. 7, March 2009

This article is an extract from our paper for this years EDem conference in Krems. The whole paper will be published by the Austrian Computer Society under the titel “BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN E-PARTICIPATION APPROACHES

The EDem conference series is jointly organised by the Danube University Krems and the University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna.

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