Archive for the ‘experince’ Category
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17. May 2010 – 09:45 by Civil College
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During the last member meeting of Pep-net in Krems, we have made several statements about the future perspectives of Pep-net and the paths, how we should get there. A common point of view, that members have shared collectively during the meeting that we need good leadership to the path as well, how we plan to formulate future Pep-net. I am recommending two opinions for designing and planning our common future.
The first one is a connecting discussion in a LinkedIn group:
What are for practitioners the key aspects of good governance and management practices (particularly for NPOs).
Imagine you get suddenly involved in a new NPO, what are for you the fist aspects or characteristics to look at to get an idea whether they are “best-in-class” or rather “not at al best-in-class”? In fact, what is your ‘short check list’ to get your first impression?
The group discussion contains several key document links, which can help to formulate an opinion about an organization’s state of management.
The other one is a book, that I strongly recommend to all readers – if you have not read the great book Leadership from Below from Trond Arne Undheim, which is giving a great perspective, how to lead an organization, from below of yourself.
Happy Monday to all readers!
Posted in experince, good practice, Trends | No Comments »
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11. May 2010 – 10:06 by Dorothee Ruetschle (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Die deutsche Originalfassung des Artikels “Grants for Greece – Where does our money flow?” finden Sie im Blog “government2020″ unter http://www.government2020.de/blog/?p=61.
Jörn von Lucke beschreibt, wie den Einsatz von Open Government in Texas und zeigt, wie dieses Konzept den Europäern mehr Transparenz über die Verwendung von Finanzhilfen in Griechenland ermöglichen könnte:
“In Zeiten einer weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise sollte uns der US-Bundesstaat Texas ein Vorbild sein. Susan Combs, Controllerin des US-Staates Texas, hat sich zu einer Vorreiterin transparenter Staatshaushalte gemacht. Mit dem Portal „Transparency at Work“ (Cashdrill: http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/expendlist/cashdrill.php) ist es seit 2007 allen Bürgern und der Presse möglich, den aktuellen Staatshaushalt von Texas nach unterschiedlichen Suchkriterien tagesaktuell auszuwerten. …”
Den vollständigen Text können Sie hier nachlesen.
Posted in experince, good practice, open data, Projects, Trends, Visions | No Comments »
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28. April 2010 – 19:44 by E-Voting.CC
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The final report on the Austrian E-Voting use is online an available for download in German here. Read the short summary of the report on Pep-Net.eu:
The implementation of e-voting for the elections to the Austrian Federation of students was one of the most sophisticated e-government projects in 2009. It’s aim was to complement the paper based voting with an electronic voting channel. Together with the implementation of e-voting the legal basis was adapted to include an electronic election administration.
This first of a kind implementation of e-voting in Austria was technically successful. Almost 1% (2.161) of the eligible students cast their votes electronically between 18th and 22nd of May 2009. For identification and authentication, they used the citizen card (the Austrian model of a smart card with digital signature) and a suitable smartcard-reader device, which was handed out for free. The anonymity was performed by using a cryptographic protocol in the post-electoral phase, similar to a paper based postal voting procedure. The e-voting servers were placed in two data centers of the Federal Computing Centre to allow for fail-safe operation.
The use of the citizen card was appropriate because of its associated high safety and powerful legal standing. However the penetration of the citizen card is rather low at present. Therefore, the federal ministry of science and research started the initiative studi.gv.at with the purpose to raise awareness and penetration of the citizen card amongst students. While over 14.000 students made use of this opportunity, only a small portion of them used e-voting. Main reason to this is the general limited number of applications aimed at students which make use of this card. The general acceptance and with it the penetration numbers for this smart card will only be reached when a wide range and a large number of additional services are provided with appropriate functionality, especially for students.
The discussion around e-voting was rather controversial with clear pro and contra positions. On the one side the federal ministry of science and research and on the other side selected representatives of the federation of students. The discussion dominated the electoral campaigns and hurt the institution of the elections.
For future uses of e-voting in Austria the penetration of identification and authentication means has to be raised as well as a more positive atmosphere amongst the stakeholders has to be reached.
by E-Voting.CC
Posted in Events, experince, News, Projects | No Comments »
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23. April 2010 – 11:57 by Madarász Csaba
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We have not heard too much about Bulgarian e-participation cases. Not a surprise if we now understand a bit better the CEE eparticipation current state. However the case below has happened a couple of years ago, it does help to get a small imprint about how to achieve change through electronic means- particularly, if you are a Bulgarian citizen living abroad.
Starting from February 2005 Bulgarian nationals living abroad, protested with an online petition against “the health insurance taxes
blackmail”. 10000 signatures from people living in 96 countries were collected, asking for a change the Bulgarian health insurance law. The
law disregards the fact that Bulgarian emigrants have regularly paid their health insurance contributions in their respective countries of
residence and forces them to pay this contribution in Bulgaria too.
This continued for almost 2 years before the law was changed. In January 2007 Bulgarian emigrants organized the first Bulgarian rally
in Brussels in front of the offices of the bulgarian diplomatic mission. More than 50 people came from 6 European countries to protest
against the discriminative law.
The opposition party Union of Democratic Forces finally introduced the corresponding law bill, which was rejected by the ruling Socialist
party. On 29 February 2008 MP from the ruling party received thousands of SMS from all around with the same text: Please, do not block the
bill exempting emigrants from health insurance contribution.
Messages blocked their mobile phones and the scandal became a headline news in Bulgaria.
On 27.03.2008 the Parliament amended the bill and emigrants claimed victory. Unfortunately this bill covers the period till the end of
2007 only. Starting from 2008 bulgarian emigrants have to pay again health insurance contribution, but only if they live outside the
European union.
The online petition: http://www.podpiski.org
In the news: http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=75719
(thanks to Boyan Yurukov)
Posted in experince, News | No Comments »
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21. April 2010 – 16:18 by echo source
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eParticipation is often equalized with “digital democracy”. Top-down approaches are based on the assumption that participation means involving citizens in governmental power structures. As governmental power builds on the development and execution of policies, it has been tried to make citizens participate in policy making. This led to the idea of a direct digital democracy, where virtually every law could be drafted and decided on by the citizens themselves. However, this vision of open virtual parliament or digital democracy faces several serious difficulties. Firstly, because of the lack of technical solutions for scalable discussion & co-editing, collective drafting is not possible with existing online tools. Thus, there is still plenty of space for new innovations in this field to overcome such technical constrains. More importantly, such a participatory digital democracy would be characterized by single-issue decisions. This certainly can be seen as one of its greatest advantages. But if open drafting would generally result in binding laws, its democratic legitimation would have to be guaranteed. Thus, citizens would have to participate in virtually every running decision at local, regional, national and European level at the same time. Since this is absolutely impossible, decisions would be made by random sets of participants (probably mainly lobbyists) without any democratic legitimation. Clearly, eParticipation cannot and should not be understood as an alternative for existing representative democracy, but rather as a complementary instrument.
To solve this dilemma, today´s eParticipation initiatives do not allow citizens to make binding decisions. Instead they ask people to contribute their ideas and preferences to preparatory stages of official decision-making processes. The binding decisions are still made by the institutions and their traditional decision-makers. In fact, eParticipation today is limited to eConsultations. It neither really empowers citizens, nor does it take into account their very own issues and concerns. As a result, the motivation for participation is very limited.
Instead of having been empowered, many participants may feel somehow betrayed or used to legitimate official decisions. From this perspective, eParticipation might be more interesting for decision-makers than for most citizens, who mainly look at politics as something quite boring and frustrating, which they do not feel very attracted to.
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
- E-PARTICIPATION AS ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP”
The EDem conference series is jointly organised by the Danube University Krems and the University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna.
Posted in experince | 5 Comments »
