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.
The course materials are written in Spanish, which will be the main language of instruction too; however, student’s contributions in English and Portuguese will also be fully welcomed.
The course is aimed at public sector’s technical staff, politicians, elected representatives, academics and members of civil society organizations whose work is linked with the design, implementation or execution of eParticipation/Participation projects and programs, or which have a special interested in Civic Participation and the possibilities offered by new communication technologies to strengthen it.
By combining students with different professional backgrounds and geographical extractions, we intend to create groups that provide a rich and varied environment for learning.
Participants will thus not only acquire a solid and irreverent understanding of (e)Participation, but will also have the opportunity to reflect and exchange perspectives and experiences with people from different countries and cultures.
As part of the course practical assignments, they will also contribute to the collaborative design of the Kyosei-Polis system, a municipal (e)Participation environment that our Association is planning to build after the course.
You can also write us with your questions at info@ckyosei.org.
The course will take place between the 13. of September and the 31. of October, lasting 7 weeks. The enrollment -which costs 150 US$- can be performed at the following registration page.
PS: I’ve been informed that 10 partial scholarships will be granted, where it is required (participation would thus cost just 75 US$). The form to apply for the scholarship is available here.
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.
Last weeks resignation of Horst Köhler as Federal President is a unique incident in Germany’s history and demonstrates that social media have become a political force that can not be neglected anymore.
Horst Köhler resigned as Federal President because of public criticism of his comments about Germany’s mission in Afghanistan. Interestingly the radio interview in which he elaborated on the reasons for Germany’s international military engagement was broadcast by May 22nd already and did not lead to noteworthy coverage in the mainstream media.
The first to pick up Köhler’s controversial remarks about the relations of Germany’s economic interests and the Afghanistan mission was the fairly unknown blog unpolitik.de, followed by five others with a rather limited reach. In parallel also better known bloggers covered the story – but still none of the mainstream media (see carta.info for a detailed report).
One of the bloggers ( ) who felt especially disgusted about the media’s ignorance directly approached several big newspapers and magazines via twitter, asking for some reaction.
After “Deutschlandradio” broadcasted an interview with the Christian Democrat Ruprecht Polenz on May 27th, who said that Köhler expressed himself imprecisely, the media storm slowly gained momentum. A very critical report that appeared in Germany’s biggest news magazine “Der Spiegel” might finally have pushed Köhler over the edge.
But influence of social media did not end here. Pretty soon after the political class had overcome the state of shock, Chancellor Angela Merkel was said to have already a favourite for the vacant position: the quite well reputed Minister for Family Affairs, Ursula von der Leyen. Unfortunately von der Leyen became a hate figure among netizens in 2009 due to her ambitions to block Internet sites in order to fight child pornography. The respective policy was perceived by the net community as attempt to set up a censorship infrastructure generally enabling the government to block particular websites.
A strong and still growing network opposing these ideas quickly formed within the German internet community. (…) The HashTag used by the protesters is #zensursula – a German mash up of the Minister’s name and the word censorship equivalent to #censursula. As part of the public’s protest an official e-Petition directed at the German parliament was launched. Within three days 50,000 persons signed the petition – – the number required for the petition titled „No indexing and blocking of Internet sites“ to be heard by the parliament. The running time of an e-Petition in Germany is 6 weeks – within this time over 130,000 people signed making this e-Petition the most signed and most successful ever. (link)
Quite understandably this movement against net censorship was not delighted by the prospect of von der Leyen becoming Germany’s next President – and immediately revived the campaign. For the same reason but even more important the Liberal Democrats – part of the currently governing coalition – rejected the proposal as well.
The German chancellor adapted to the situation immediately and presented the state premier of Lower Saxony, Christian Wulff, as official candidate instead. Read the rest of this entry »
7. June 2010 – 16:36 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Vienna Airport: free wifi
Everyone is talking about citizen-led service redesign these days, the idea that social media can allow citizens to design services and thus help the public sector meet their needs better whilst reducing waste. IDEA (the UK’s Improvement and Development Agency) is following up the publication of Local by Social, a guide to using social media to solve local problems, by teaming up with FutureGov to host an event bringing together local government officials and social innovators.
Whilst local authorities deliver hundreds of services on a local level, the EU is more distant. The ratio of citizens to staff is much higher, which makes that contact more difficult. The ever-present language barrier is a problem, as it always is when co-operating with other EU countries. Finally, the distance that you would have to travel to have face-to-face meetings is a lot larger. And worst of all, you’d have to meet in a café rather than a pub!
But the first question you would have to answer would be “What to design?”. One candidate is the European Citizens’ Initiative (or an online version of it), which is a provision in the Lisbon Treaty stipulating that if 1 million European citizens sign a petition, it has to be considered by the Commission. echo source started the ball rolling on this blog by raising some questions that need answering.
Or how about something new? Say, mini-grants for communities that want to twin themselves with communities in other countries and run a hyperlocal blog with an international touch, and a bit of money for cultural exchanges? As ever, ideas aren’t in short supply but it’s a matter of finding the best ones and putting them into practice. So it all comes down to cracking some of those problems I mentioned above.
Whatever you think of the EU, the freedom of movement, single currency and cheap transport between member states, added to access to online tools — brilliant at allowing collaboration over long distances — means that there was never a time when citizen-led service redesign on an EU level was more possible!
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.
Bürgerhaushalt, Leitbildentwicklung, Gesetzgebungsverfahren und die Bau- und Landschaftsfplanung – in diesen Bereichen werden vermehrt Beteiligungsverfahren über das Internet aufgesetzt.
Vor der Durchführung einer Online-Beteiligung stellen sich zahlreiche Fragen:
Was lässt sich mit einer Beteiligung konkret erreichen?
Wann sollte das Medium Internet genutzt werden?
Wie hoch sind Kosten und Aufwände?
Welche Methoden können eingesetzt werden?
Wie wird die Beteiligung zum Erfolg?
Die Bertelsmann Stiftung gibt gemeinsam mit dem Deutschen Städte- und Gemeindebund (DSTGB), der Finanzbehörde der Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg und dem Bundesministerium des Inneren dazu einen 62-seitigen Leitfaden „Online-Konsultation“ heraus, der „Praxisempfehlungen für die Einbeziehung der Bürgerinnen und Bürger über das Internet“ gibt. Für politische Mandatsträger, Entscheidungsträger und Mitarbeiter öffentlicher Verwaltungen, insbesondere eGovernment Beauftragte, stellen die beschriebenen Handlungsempfehlungen sicherlich eine wertvolle Entscheidungshilfe dar.
Im ersten Teil werden anhand zahlreicher Praxisbeispiele, wie dem Bürgerhaushalt in Hamburg und der Online-Bauleitplanung, Potenziale und Voraussetzungen für Online-Beteiligungen erörtert. Der zweite Teil beschreibt Erfolgsfaktoren und gibt Tipps zur Vorbereitung, Durchführung und zur Auswertung der Online-Beteiligung.
Der Leitfaden steht als PDF (~8MB) zum Download bereit.
19. May 2010 – 10:33 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
by HubSpot on flickr.com
Over the course of the last weeks and months the discussion about privacy on Facebook and other social networks has become ever more intense and heated. A quick look on Google news for example reveals more than 4.000 news articles about this issue. One of the initiators for this debate was decision by Facebook to (again) change its approach to privacy by making more information about its users public by default. If you would like to get a feeling about the level of publicity Facebook profiles have reached just take a quick look at youropenbook.org (a search engine for all public status updates) or reclaimprivacy.org (a tool that allows you to scan your privacy settings and show you what is public).
In this climate of rising distrust towards Facebook many digerati and web users have stated the need for an alternative social networking infrastructure that allows for more control by the user without making the management of your online privacy to complicated.
19. May 2010 – 09:16 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Photo of Robert Krimmer
When Britons went to vote in the General Election on 6th May, some of them were locked out of the polling booths and were not able to cast their votes. An article on the PublicTechnology website suggested that eVoting could be the answer to this problem, and should be given another chance.
I spoke to Robert Krimmer - Director and Founder of the Competence Center for Electronic Voting in Austria and a founding member of PEP-NET - to find out whether he agreed.
John Heaven: Hi Robert. What is E-Voting.cc, and what do you mean by eVoting?
Robert Krimmer: E-Voting.cc is an Austrian Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that fosters the development of eVoting. We deal with any type of eVoting - whether electronic machines in polling booths, internet voting, voting through cash machines, mobile phone voting. The important thing is that the act of casting a vote is done electronically.
JH: So does that include the punch-card system that is used in the United States?
JH: You have heard about the problems that UK voters had last week: there were complaints about voters queuing for hours only to be turned away at 10pm. Could eVoting have solved this problem, as discussed in a recent PublicTechnology article?
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.
If you need any further information, you can consult the 
Clearly mobile platforms are quickly becoming an 
dably this movement against net censorship was not delighted by the prospect of von der Leyen becoming Germany’s next President – and immediately revived the campaign. For the same reason but even more important the Liberal Democrats – part of the currently governing coalition – 
Happy Monday to all readers!
