17. September 2010 – 15:45 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
One of the first steps in trying to open up the budgeting process is to present a communal, regional or even national budget into in way that is accessible for the average citizen. In most cases budgets are published as documents with hundreds of pages and enormous tables with number containing a bunch of zeros – which might be a hurdle for many people to join into a discussion about this important topic.
The German website OffenerHaushalt.de (in German), built by Tactical Tools (“a network of enthusiast and experts”), tries to address this problem by presenting the federal budget of Germany in an interactive and intuitive fashion. The picture below shows the front page with each ministries budget presented in a different colour.
After clicking a budget (like in this case defense) the allocation of the budget to different areas and activities is shown in an easy to understand way. This way you can drill down into the budget to get a sense of its structure and how funds are used.
All data presented can also be exported in different standardized formats (JSON and XML among them) and all source data is also accessible. However there is also a sign for the need of more structured open data as the site is asking its visitors for hints to a machine readable version of the 2011 federal budget.
In summary this website is a great example of how to display complex numerical information in an accessible way. The ideas presented here could be integrated into eParticipatory budgeting processes to lower the barrier to entry for citizens or to help to introduce new audiences to these processes.
8. September 2010 – 22:40 by Institute for Electronic Participation
According to the latest UN E-Participation Index measurement, the majority of South Eastern European countries improved their global standing regarding the quality and usefulness of information and services for the purpose of engaging its citizens in public policy making through the use of e-government programs. Nevertheless, e-participation in SEE countries is still falling behind their e-government developments. An overview of current e-participation situation in SEE within government domain will be presented, highlighting key elements needed for strengthening e-democracy in the region. One of them will be focused on non-governmental organizations and civil society e-participation experience (e.g. on-line Citizen’s forum) needed for shaping inclusive and citizens oriented e-government policy.
Lecture presented by Simon Delakorda, M. Sc., executive director, Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA) and member of the Central and Eastern Citizens Network eParticipation expert group.
6. August 2010 – 17:28 by Institute for Electronic Participation
E-participation & E-democracy workshop was organized as a part of the Citizens Participation University 2010 which took place from 20th to 24th of July in the Civil College in Kunszentmiklós-Kunbábony (Hungary).
10 NGOs representatives and activists from Armenia, Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Poland and Romania attended the workshop.
Participants were introduced with E-participation / E-democracy concept, political documents of the Council of Europe relating to eDemocracy, current e-participation developments in Central and Eastern Europe and different e-participation tools as well as good practices. The second part of the workshop facilitated open discussion about opportunities for involving e-participation tools into current and future civil society projects in the region.
30. July 2010 – 10:31 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Clearly mobile platforms are quickly becoming an important way to use the internet and some are arguing phones and other mobile devices have already become our most important devices. In the wake of this development the idea of mobile apps, most importantly on iPhone and Android devices, has become the way to get additional functionality in the hands of users. App development however is not for the faint of heart and very specific skills are needed to get started in this field.
Google tries to improve the app situation for Android phones by introducing App Inventor, a tool that allows building Android apps simply by using a drag-and-drop interface. The video below shows how a very simple Android app is build and run on a phone using this web-based tool. As I am getting into App Inventor right now I can assure you it is much more capable than what you see in the video but it still illustrates the concepts.
On April 22, during the Earth Day 2010, the WAVE Consortium proceeded to the official launch of the second phase: the objective today is to reach 6,000 users over Europe. The first phase gathered more than 300 users in the pilot countries: France, Lithuania and England.
The ultimate goal for all the partners is to create a community of users and debaters in charge of testing online the WAVE platform and its innovating tool: Debategraph. This forum will use ground breaking graphical techniques to enable everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge, to exchange views and debate on complex climate change issues.
The WAVE Project will end in January 2011, after which the European Commission will decide whether this tool is efficient among others and if it should be used more intensively.
Climate change is one of the most challenging and most serious phenomenons which we must face today. Therefore citizens, special interest groups and decision-makers are invited to mobilize and subscribe, free of charge, to the following websites:
One of the major tasks the organizers of eParticipation projects face is designing workflows to bring thousands of people together in one online discussion – especially when the aim is not only to deliberate about a specific topic, but to produce concrete and useful outcomes. Two projects in America and Germany try to reach out to citizens all over the nation, using two very different approaches: In the US, “Our Budget, our Economy”, organized by AmericaSpeaks, and in Germany, the BürgerForum, initiated by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and Heinz Nixdorf Stiftung and conducted with the help of Zebralog Hagedorn.
“Our Budget, Our Economy” has reached its peak with a series of live events, so called Town Meetings, all over the USA on June 26th. Here, approximately 3,500 participants have discussed about the federal budget and worked out a message, saying which reforms they find to be most important. As the organizers announced, the project should help the participants to “weigh-in on the difficult choices necessary to put our federal budget on a sustainable path.”
We at Zebralog are currently working on the third edition of the BürgerForum, an online-discussion forum dedicated to produce the so called citizen agenda. In 2011, about 10,000 German citizens are going to join the discussion about the growing diversity in Germany’s society. Read the rest of this entry »
24. May 2010 – 10:19 by ActValue Consulting & Solutions
Few days ago Carnegie Mellon University published a survey about how useful is Twitter for the marketing research. In fact figures have shown that 86% of “twits” (opinions expressed on Twitter) are similar to traditional marketing surveys.
Noah Smith’s team has analyzed billion of twits related to Barak Obama’s election. They divided them into topics and sentiment (negative or positive) and they have traced the same trends as the official survey such as Index Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and the Economic Confidence Index (Gallup) have shown.
This experience is a pioneer for the evolution on the marketing research, which is still too much stuck to the traditional survey system. To develop a social network analysis can bring 3 advantages:
1- To get real time feed back
2- To avoid institutional channels in collecting opinions
3- To have access to improvised information generated by the customers and to get back to their questions with real time answers
This is a very hard challenge for the web technicians: the only thing they should to do is to trace a path of crumbs like Ulysses by Joyce.
21. May 2010 – 10:08 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Two of the major challenges for eParticipation today are scale (what to do if there are 100.000 contributions) and the problem of quantifying the positions in qualitative discussions (clearly knowing who supports what etc.). Automatic analysis and categorization of contributions could be a possible solution to these problems or at least a valuable support to human moderators and facilitators. The challenge of reliable automatic argument analysis has not been solved yet and a perfect solution might be out of reach for a long time, but with the announcement of the data prediction API at the Google I/O conference yesterday a workable solution could be available soon.
The data prediction API is a service that is able to categorize random text based on how it has been trained with known categorized data. For example: If the service was trained that “This is an english sentence” is “English” and that “La idioma mas fina” is “Spanish” it will be able to determine that “Qué Hay De Nuevo” is also “Spanish”. Of course this is a very simple example but the service is potentially able to categorize complex texts based on the training it has received with known data. Details about the process can be found in the developers guide (warning technical content). Read the rest of this entry »
10. May 2010 – 13:44 by Dorothee Ruetschle (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Prof. Dr. Jörn von Lucke wrote an interesting article concerning the current discussion about Greece:
Grants for Greece – Where does our money flow?
Author: Professor Dr. Jörn von Lucke
In times of a global financial and economic crisis, the U.S. State of Texas might be a role model. Susan Combs, Comptroller of the State of Texas, is a pioneer for more transparent budgets. Since 2007, the portal “Cash Drill: Transparency at Work” has enabled all citizens and the press to evaluate the state budget of Texas and to analyze it according to various criteria (Cash Drill: http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/expendlist/cashdrill.php). Various search tools are available under the “Where the Money Goes” banner. They help to create spending overviews by agency, by category, by vendors and by purchasing items. Additionally, comparisons of previous expenditures are possible with the planned budget of an agency. Such an evaluation is made possible through a data warehouse that contains these information accessible in multiple languages. Citizens also have the opportunity to communicate their experiences, impressions and to give tips for suspected corruption directly. Read the rest of this entry »
We always have the pleasure, to give news about great tools on the edge. One of them is released again, aiming reliable data analisys as an easy process.
Searh, classify, annotate, verify and report on text data. A great combination of social networking and social science.
He is behind the development of the PCAT system, which is based upon Shulman’s award-winning Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), also developed by QDAP. CAT enables researchers to code, validate, and analyze large digital, text-based datasets. CAT is designed for use with any digitized text dataset, whereas PCAT is tailored to improve analysis in the rulemaking process. “PCAT is an example of successful technology transfer from an academic laboratory to the government sector. It speaks to the needs of federal officials who must be responsive to the increasing volume of public comments in the new digital landscape.”
Although the tool is free and web based, it assists agencies in searching, analyzing, and responding to citizen comments submitted to federal regulatory agencies through sites such as www.regulations.gov. Regulations.gov is a centralized federal portal that enables “citizens to search, view, and comment on regulations issued by the U.S. government.” PCAT is designed to work seamlessly with bulk downloads from regulations.gov. It allows agency officials to review the hundreds, thousands, or at times hundreds of thousands of comments submitted to agencies in response to the several thousand federal rules proposed each year.
The previous functionalities are showing, that this software has been designed in the USA for federal usage- but it does not restircts its functions to the USA. It can extract data from
Federal Docket Management System archives
IdeaScale archives
RSS Feeds, archived or live
Email, Blog, Wiki, and other Web 2.0 documents
CAT-style datasets
Plain text, HTML, or XML documents
Extracted Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF document
What can you do with it?
Search for key concepts & code raw text
Annotate coding with shared memos
Remove duplicates and cluster similar comments
Auto-highlight unique and offensive language
Form peer and project networks
Establish multi-level credentials and permissions
Assign multiple coders to specific tasks
Easily measure inter-coder reliability
Adjudicate valid & invalid decisions
Generate reports in RTF, CSV or XML format
Archive or share completed projects online
I am really wondering, when our old Europe will have something like a Federal Docket Management System (http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#home). It might boost up some participation, but we would need to solve the language issues still…
Clearly mobile platforms are quickly becoming an 
On April 22, during the Earth Day 2010, the WAVE Consortium proceeded to the official launch of the second phase: the objective today is to reach 6,000 users over Europe. The first phase gathered more than 300 users in the pilot countries: France, Lithuania and England.
major challenges for eParticipation today are scale (what to do if there are 100.000 contributions) and the problem of quantifying the positions in qualitative discussions (clearly knowing who supports what etc.). Automatic analysis and categorization of contributions could be a possible solution to these problems or at least a valuable support to human moderators and facilitators. The challenge of reliable automatic argument analysis has not been solved yet and a perfect solution might be out of reach for a long time, but with the announcement of the 
