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17. May 2010 – 10:14 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo of Chuck Hirt
I spoke to Chuck Hirt, from the Central and Eastern European Citizens’ Network (CEECN, a member of PEP-NET) about eParticipation in Central and Eastern Europe. Chuck says that eParticipation along Western European lines is “science fiction” in C&E Europe. On the other hand, people who visit the region are often “inspired by the spirit, energy and enthusiasm” there.
John Heaven: Hi Chuck. Please tell me a bit about CEECN.
Chuck Hirt: The Central and Eastern European Citizens Network gives grass-roots citizens organisations the opportunity to work together, share ideas, and enhance their organisational growth. It started by bringing together staff and citizens from a few organisations across Central and Eastern Europe, who found the meetings really helpful - if anything, just to gain inspiration and energy to take home and continue the struggle.
We found out that several of us were funded by a US donor organisation, the Charles Stewart Mott foundation. They said they would be happy to promote this activity, but asked that we included organisations from further away in the east. We were happy to do this, and our members now come from 19 different countries.
The network is going strong, and we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. We are just making preparations for a Citizens’ Participation University. At the moment we are doing some research into the state of participation to act as a base line.
JH: What is the key to the network’s success?
CH: The network was a good place for exchanging stories and experience, putting on training from the start and particularly running a conference every two years. But things started taking off as we began to find way to become proactive and institute events like “Citizen Participation Week”. This was a lot of hard work but gave us a focus. This was quite an exciting moment.
JH: What achievements does CEECN have to its name?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Interview, Uncategorized, Visions, experince, members | No Comments »
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11. May 2010 – 14:40 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Here are some articles I found that relate to eParticipation, mostly from PEP-NET members. Of course there’s plenty of other material on this blog — don’t forget to look at Dan Jellinek’s write-up of the PEP-NET workshop at the EDem10 conference.
“Deutschland bewegt sich… Open Data im Kommen?“, Government 2.0 Netzwerk: This article reports on a discussion event involving the Chief Information Officer of the Bundesministerium des Inneren (the Home Office) who states that Open Data has a place in the national eGovernment strategy. Recent US and UK moves towards open data are noted, and the author says “the increasing number of pro-Open Data voices within the ruling coalition gives cause for hope“. This confirms my impression from last week’s EDem10 conference that Europe is on the ball when it comes to eParticipation issues.
“The day we designed deliberative democracy“, Delib: An event “to figure out what digital deliberative democracy might/should look like when mapped on to some specific problems” organised by Delib through their blog (see the article here) was a success. You can see some photos of the event here. The blog article promised full results in time. Delib is a PEP-NET member.
“24 hours of culture“, Jon Bounds: Jon Bounds, social media consultant (and much more) from Birmingham, UK, describes how the Birmingham Cultural Partnership got people involved in capturing 24 hours in the cultural life of Britain’s second largest city using simple, accessible social media tools. The resulting 350 contributions are testament to its success. Talking about Jon Bounds, I found this clip of him opening Digbeth’s first cash point with Nicki Getgood, founder of Digbeth Is Good. I think it’s really funny, and it shows that participation in local issues can be a laugh.
“EVOTE2010 conference registration is now online!“, E-Voting.cc: PEP-NET Member E-Voting.cc announces the fourth annual conference on electronic voting, taking place from 21st to 24th July 2010 in Bregenz, Austria. Follow the instructions on the page to register.
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10. May 2010 – 13:43 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Andy Williamson at EDem10
The EDem10 Conference, organised by PEP-NET member The Danube University, took place last week in the picturesque town of Krems, Austria. I enjoyed meeting people from across Europe who are figuring out just how the web can change the relationship between citizens, politicians and administrations for the better. I was also pleased to see that Europe is having a healthy debate on eParticipation and has plenty of experience and expertise to offer. The PEP-NET dinner on the evening before the conference was a perfect opportunity to meet everybody.
Many of the PEP-NET members I met were delivering speeches and workshops and sitting on panels — including the keynote speech on the first day (Andy Williamson, Director of Digital Democracy at the Hansard Society) and a dedicated PEP-NET workshop by Dan Jellinek and Hans Hagedorn. Dan has already blogged about the PEP-NET workshop on this blog.
To overgeneralise, my impression was that there are principles that apply in any country, but that Europe and even each individual country has specific issues around eParticipation. Read the rest of this entry »
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4. May 2010 – 09:13 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Dominic's Twitter profile pic
Dominic Campbell, Director and founder of British consultancy FutureGov, has taken time off from his day job to volunteer for the Labour party election campaign. Dominic kindly found the time between meetings with the likes of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband for me to interview him about government, what can be learned from the US, and his role in the Labour Party election campaign.
Dominic’s comments relating to the Labour Party are made in a personal capacity and not as director of FutureGov.
John Heaven: Hi Dominic. Many thanks for your time today - I know you must be very busy with only three days to go until the general election. First question: Why did you found FutureGov?
Dominic Campbell: I first became involved in local government as a graduate trainee at Barnet Council. Within four years, I was heading a department. Despite being promoted so quickly, I didn’t have the influence that I had expected. In order to change things for the better, I decided I needed to influence the whole sector instead of being dependent on one manager or one council leader.
JH: What is it about local government that fascinates you?
DC: Funnily enough, I was asked the other day which part of government I’d most like to work in. My answer was unequivocally “local government”: it’s the most diverse, interesting and closest to people. It has a different culture from central government, and the right people at the right time really can be agile and make change without asking for permission. I don’t have time for council leaders who say that government isn’t decentralised enough that they don’t have autonomy to do stuff without asking.
JH: I noticed your work with Harvard University for FutureGov on “eGov” and “WeGov”. What is that all about?
DC: eGov - eGovernment - is top-down and centralised. It’s about maintaining the old way of doing government but doing it more efficiently by adding a layer of IT over old bureaucracy. eGov is expensive, and you have no autonomy as a human being to change things and make them work better. It has gone as far as it can: we’ve had web forms, SAP systems and the like. eGovernment has made government better, but now we’re moving onto the next stage, which is WeGov.
WeGov is about harnessing web 2.0, and promoting social innovation to change the way government works and redesign services. It’s about saying “people are getting on and doing things without us. How can we make the most of what they’re doing?”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those people who says eGovernment is rubbish and web 2.0 is the only way. eGovernment served a purpose, and it is now evolving to the next stage.
JH: What can the UK learn from the US and vice versa?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Interview, Trends, Uncategorized, Visions | No Comments »
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3. May 2010 – 16:02 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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(Photo by Faungg on Flickr.com)
I enjoyed reading these articles and websites related to eParticipation from across Europe. If you have any more, by all means link to them in the comments!
Waltzing Matilda, the European Commission: The European Commission has launched a new blog that aims to gather views on how it should be using social media like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc.. “Waltzing Matilda“, as the blog is called, was launched on 19th April. Waltzing Matilda is just one of many blogs on the blogs.europa.eu platform, which also hosts some European Commissioners’ blogs.
“Man muss seine Energie nicht in Twitter stecken“, der Freitag: In an interview with the German weekly der Freitag about online election campaigning, Thilo von Pape, Communication Studies specialist, said “There’s no need to invest your energy in Twitter”. He said it is unlikely that online elections campaigns along the lines of Barack Obama’s will be seen in Germany: “Politicians should just accept that Germans aren’t the same as Americans.”
ePractice.eu Editor’s Choice, WeGov: PEP-NET members the Napier University, the Hansard Society and Gov2U are involved in a project called “WeGov”, which is currently the Editor’s Choice on ePractice.eu. The three-year project involves partners from the UK, Belgium, Germany and Greece and seeks to develop new tools to allow policy-makers to interact with citizens.
Flashvote project, ePractice.eu: The French City of Bordeaux organised a “flash vote”: in a spontaneous public event lasting less than ten minutes and including a dance routine, youngsters were asked to vote on a number of issues. They were able to vote on a 17-point agenda by text message and using the internet on mobile devices. The project cost, according to ePractice.eu, was in the € 1,000-5,000 bracket.
Posted in Projects, Uncategorized, members | No Comments »
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3. May 2010 – 10:02 by echo source
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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.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
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29. April 2010 – 16:39 by Julia Glidden
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A recent experience that my neighbours and I have had with Brent Council echoes Gez’s warnings about that new ‘Duties to Involve’ risk increasingly disillusionment with politics if done wrongly or insincerely.
In this instance, Brent Council faced losing tens of millions of pounds for new social housing if planning permission were not granted for a new building in January. In a tight economic climate, it is understandable that the Council made a foregone decision to grant the permission. What is neither understandable nor acceptable is that the Council pretended that an incomprehensible mailing to residents upheld its own ‘Duty to Involve’ policy, and that the planning meeting itself was an open and unbiased event.
Believing Committee members were genuinely open to facts my neighbours spent countless hours drafting model mock-ups of the proposed building, trawling through highly technical documents and crafting extensivly detailed arguments regarding the inadequacy of the proposal, only to find Committee members more interested in whether the windows of one house in one neighbourhood violated conservation codes than the overall impact of 150 unit dwelling. That legally mandated information was not available until just days before the meeting or that an arcane and inaccessible website kept crashing so much so that residents had to stay up until after midnight simply to down load key documents is another matter……
Having attended the Planning Meeting myself, I saw first hand the disillusionment that a ‘faux’ consultation exercise can have on citizens. Having dutifully trudged along to a so-called ’site visit’ in the freezing cold - only to be presented with arcane architectural plans on a sub-zero street corner, my neighbours did not even realise that current technology would have made it relatively easy for the Council to post virtual mock-ups of the proposed building with easy to understand depictions of its noise and light impact on the neighbourhood on their website. While they may not be blaming the Council for a sub-standard use of ICT, they are certainly all disgusted by a sham ‘Duty to Consult’ that wasted their time, and made a mockery of the Council’s own policy.
This same Council is now hosting a community seminar next week on ‘Community Involvement.’ My neighbour passed what he referred to as ‘this joke’ along to me because he knew I would be interested in the subject. I am. But the ‘open’ seminar is a being held in community centre between 12-4 on a weekday. I would ask the Consultation Institute how ‘open’ - let alone representative - an event which excludes most of the working population really is? Surely, a Council that genuinely wants to hear from all its citizens would make some sort of attempt to leverage the Internet? Unless, of course, it is really not interested at all?
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28. April 2010 – 16:17 by Olga Lacigova - 21c
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Do you ever wonder if eGovernment will lead to a new form of democracy or if eGovernment can survive without eTrust? Or do you care who owns data about you; the government or you? If yes, then is time for you to join the debate!
The World Congress on IT (WCIT) 2010 which will take place in Amsterdam 25-27 May has prepared an online debate where thought leaders, including Dr. Julia Glidden the founding member of Pep-Net, will debate with their counterpart on questions that concern us all.
Everyone is welcome to join the online discussion and post a comment, rate the arguments or tweet at #wcit2010egov.
To participate go to http://virtualspace.nclude.us/, select the theme you want to discuss. You can choose from six themes including: ICT-revolution vs ICT-challenge, Open Source or The information society.
So if you think you have something to say about these themes or just want to know what the thought leaders of eGovernment think, visit the WCIT2010 website and start the debate!
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27. April 2010 – 18:00 by Centre for E-Government
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Guest article by neu&kühn
neu&kühn, companion and developer of online projects with public participation, presented their recently published analysis for the project group E-Democracy & E-Participation on the 8th of April, 2010. In the context of a best practice analysis more than 30 international e-participation examples were reviewed and important factors for a successful collaboration highlighted. The analysis works as guide for administration, politics and institutions. Authors Kirsten Neubauer and Peter Kühnberger view social media as an opportunity for dialogue, building of trust and mobilization.
Best Practice
E-participation examples of various sizes were reviewed – from small town councils with about 2.500 citizens to megacities. The following e-participation projects represent a selection of the analyzed projects from the areas of environment, damage reports, budget and urban development. The home countries of these projects are mostly in the Anglo-American area and in Scandinavia, where local as well as national initiatives for participation can be found. The German speaking area is more likely to be focused on regional topics.
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27. April 2010 – 14:57 by Luca Raffini (University of Bergamo)
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Sono disponibili online gli atti del seminario “E-democracy 2.0 – Istituzioni, cittadini, nuove reti: un lessico possibile” (pdf):
Il volume riporta integralmente i lavori del seminario internazionale tenutosi l’8 aprile 2009 a Bologna e organizzato dalla Regione Emilia-Romagna, in collaborazione con l’Università di Bergamo, l’associazione DEPP e il network europeo Pep-net.
Nel corso del seminario, esperti italiani e internazionali, amministratori e practicioners, hanno tracciato un quadro delle esperienze di e-democracy realizzate in Italia e in Europa, evidenziandone limiti e potenzialità e individuando possibili prospettive di sviluppo. La strutturazione del seminario e il coinvolgimento di una pluralità di punti di vista e di competenze, ha consentito di affrontare, in una cornice integrata, le potenzialità democratiche del web 2.0, sia con riferimento alle esperienze di e-democracy istituzionale che alle forme di partecipazione online “dal basso”.
Le presentazioni dei relatori, Sabrina Franceschini, Anna Carola Freschi, Bryan Loader, Sandra Lotti, Wainer Lusoli, Rolf Lührs, Peter Mambrey, Mayo Fuster Morell, Luca Raffini, Laura Sartori, Chiara Sebastiani e il vivace dibattito che ha visto interagire i relatori con i numerosi partecipanti (oltre 160), hanno permesso di confrontare una pluralità di approcci teorici e pratiche. Loader in particolare ha sottolineato sia il carattere ambivalente dell’utilizzo delle nuove tecnologie come strumento di partecipazione e di ‘strong democracy’ oppure come semplice perfezionamento della democrazia neoliberista, sia la relazione fra utilizzo delle nuove tecnologie e processi di de-istitutionalizzazione.
Sebastiani ha evidenziato come le nuove tecnologie contribuiscono a trasformare la sfera pubblica e le pratiche democratiche, mentre Sartori si è soffermata sulla persistenza della questione del digital divide non solo in termini di accesso ma anche in termini di cultura digitale. Si è guardato all’esperienza statunitense, con particolare riferimento alla campagna elettorale di Barak Obama, per riflettere sulle opportunità di empowerment offerte dai nuovi strumenti del web 2.0 (Lusoli). Read the rest of this entry »
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