View from the grassroot 3. October 2008 – 14:22 by Civil College

Since Hungarian language is a bit different from latin languages, the term, e-democracy and e-participation sounds really childish and does not give back the meaning behind. However, for us, community developers the terms like e-democracy and e-participation might have a different meaning as well – it might be some good and usable things here for our communities.

The language barrier, the lack of common meaning is not the only problem if we are looking for initiatives, projects that are labelled as e-participation in Hungary. There are two other significant factors, that are helping e-participation to stay hidden for the investigating eyes.

The uncertainity of the w.r.s

1. If an organization uses eparticipation tools (which are normally not called in the technological jargon e-participatory tools) it is likely to happen, that will not think about these tools, services as e-participation, so it will be “tagged” differently and stay hidden.
2. There is no such initiative to make the meaning common and widespread. There are suppliers around the organizations with technological background, and there are advisors and officials, who has never heard about such things like that. Thus, the level of public trust towards politicians are extremely low every year- according to the annual study, which is carried out during the Citizen Participation Week, in late September each year. So we can not really trust in their initiative power – as citizens.

The situation might be similar in many countries. But what seems to be a bigger problem, that e-participation and e-democracy is an unknown among the most journalists and scientists as well. Maybe this is not surprising, since democracy is a really new thing in Hungary, where people get used to follow dictation for decades, and the roots of fear from power and hopelessness to change the political elit has become one of our nations characteristics. But it is not only about the political elit’s behaviour – it is also about the general attitude towards learning, and citizenship culture.

It seems like that the only rich soil for e-participation are in the grassroots – in Hungary, among those, who understand technology, ready to apply their knowledge on a civil base. These things mostly happen by interest groups, as a reflection to unequal, or semi-democratic institutional behavior.

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Mind the Gap! 25. June 2008 – 13:47 by Madarász Csaba

post by Madarász Csaba, e-participation project leader of the CEE Citizens Network

The communicational and technical trends of the internet are offering a wide range of possibilities for channeling communication based contribution from various entities of the society (Artificial Intelligences are a bit behind us).

It is likely to know, that the core values of e-participation are coming from communication.
Although, it might seem, that technology has created this opportunity, but of course this is half of the truth – communication and communicational policy itself is the core factor for more than 50% of the success of e-participation projects , as it is the success factor of non-e participatory projects for 100%,

From the traditional particpation methods practicioner’s point of view (as most of our network members) there is a huge communication gap in Europe around this issue.

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