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8. November 2009 – 19:43 by Eric Legale
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“The Alliance & Progressive Socialist Democrats in the European Parliament website’s audience has doubled in one year, because of Twitter” said Tony Robinson, head of the Internet Unit for this Parliamentary Group in Strasbourg during the European e-Democracy Award presentation for the 2009, in Issy-les-Moulineaux, last October 23.
A distinction awarded by Politech Institute and IP label for the variety of web 2.0 tools used and of the content of a website whose aim is to increase citizen participation in the European debate.
A presentation to see in video: [To watch the video]
Posted in good practice, Interview, News, Twitter | No Comments »
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20. October 2009 – 15:22 by Centre for E-Government
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“A revolution doesn’t happen when a society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviours.“ (Clay Shirky)
EDem10
4th International Conference on eDemocracy
6. and 7. May 2010
Danube-University Krems
Call for Papers
Scientific eDemocracy visions and models have been developed since the 1960s, but it is now, during the first decade of the 21st Century, that they are becoming reality, being tested and implemented. Extensive IT provides the necessary basis, but it is not the developments in IT alone that are responsible for successful eDemocracy projects – it is due all those who use and apply them, as they adopt new behaviours and change old ones. The new, digital generation lives and breathes new values: they collaborate, compile content together, share their ideas, create networks on social platforms and organise themselves quickly and simply. The new values held, the new behaviours adopted, the changed mindset, along with improved usability and a still-increasing use of the internet, has led to a rapid and radical change in our society.
The EDem10 focuses on these changes which can be seen occurring in different areas and which are manifest in different way:
- Transparency & Communication (freedom of information, free information access, openness, information sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks, data visualization, eLearning, empowering, …);
- Participation & Collaboration (innovation malls, innovation communities, bottom up, top down, social networks, engagement and accountability, collaborative culture, collaboration between C2C, G2C, …);
- Architecture, Concepts & Effects (access and openness, user generated content, peer production, network effects, power laws, long tail, harnessing the power of the crowd, crowd sourcing, social web, semantic web, …);
- Different Fields: open government initiatives, eDemocracy, eParticipation, eVoting, eDeliberation;
- Approaches and Disciplines: law & legal studies, social sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, psychology, sociology, applied computer gaming and simulation, democratic theory, media and communication sciences;
- Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches;
- Research Methods.
On primary aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners. We would like to invite individuals from academic, applied and practitioner backgrounds as well as public administration offices, public bodies, NGO/NPOs, education institutions and independent organisations to submit their research and project papers.
The main conference language is English; submissions in German (with an abstract in English) are also acceptable.
Further Information:
Posted in Events | No Comments »
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9. September 2009 – 15:49 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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On September 8th and 9th 2009 the European eParticipation, eDemocracy and eVoting community met in Vienna to discuss the latest developments in the field and to work on potential strategies to move forward. I would like to talk about a few impressions of this event which has been supported by PEP-NET and was one of the events of the PEP-NET Conference Series 2009 which includes the eDem 09, Berlin in October, Future-Democracy 09 and the World e-Democracy Forum.
PEP-NET organized a workshop on “Participatory planning: conflicts, context and cooperation” (Thanks to all speakers and many participants!) on the second day of the conference. Detailed information about the talks and workshops at eDem can be found on the live coverage blog both for Day 1 and Day 2. Some participants did also use Twitter to cover the event. Their posts can be found here.
But now on to a few trends I saw in the talks and discussions:
Technology is just a tool: One of the most repeated (and possibly most true) statements by speakers and participants was that there is a need to drop the “e” in eDemocracy/Participation/Government and shift the focus of research and practical work towards the social and procedural questions. Technology is only a means of organizing processes not the solution to a problem in it self.
It’s about quality not quantity: The sheer number of participants in an online participation process cannot be seen as the most important indicator for success. In many cases the quality of the results is not depended on the number of participants but on how participate with which goal. A few hundred people form heterogeneous social and political background can produce much more sophisticated and balanced recommendations on a political issue than thousands of people who agree on the subject in discussion.
Evaluation of electronic participation processes is very difficult: Several speakers and the workshop led by David Newman tried to identify ways and methods which can be used to judge the success and the performance of eParticipation efforts on a scientific basis. I strongly believe in the necessity of this work but I also think there will not be a tool-set for error-prove evaluation in the near future. This may be one of the reasons why success is still measured in raw number of participants in many cases.
There are leading topics for eParticipation: The discussions and reactions to talks on the event support the point that there are specific groups of topics which lend themselves to eParticipation more than others. Two of them are participation in spatial and urban planning (which is mandatory in many cases and stretches the gap between eGovernment and eParticipation) and participatory budgeting (still a growing trend in Europe). The third group of topics covers internet politics and especially the question of internet filtering and surveillance. Several speakers pointed out that eParticipation projects which did not have the specific goal to address these topics where used by participants to discuss about them. This suggests that governments should try to make use of eParticipation when getting involved with internet politics.
In summary the eDem09 was both a productive gathering of scientists and researchers as well as a possibility to identify some trends in the field. I would be happy about any comments agreeing or disagreeing with my view on the event and the four trends I pointed out.
Posted in Events | 5 Comments »
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6. August 2009 – 08:36 by CTI
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The 3rd International Conference on e-Democracy is taking place in Athens, Greece, on 23-25 September 2009.
This year’s conference, under the title “Next Generation Society: Technological and Legal issues”, will explore the following questions: Is our society ready to adopt the technological advances in ubiquitous networking, next generation Internet, and pervasive computing? To what extent will it manage to evolve promptly and efficiently to a Next Generation Society, adopting the forthcoming ICT challenges? In this respect, several topics will be addressed, covering both technological and legal-sociological aspects.
For more information visit http://www.e-democracy2009.gr.
Posted in Events | No Comments »
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21. July 2009 – 01:23 by openpolis
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Rome, July 2009
After promoting different projects on e-democracy and e-partecipation in Italy (openpolis.it, voisietequi.it), the openpolis association, a spin off of the DEPP association, has officially presented to the public a new web application wholly dedicated to the monitoring of the italian Parliament: http://www.openparlamento.it.
This is the first of a series of three articles in which we describe some of the relevant features of the web application.
In this first article we describe the application, its vision and why, in our opinion, it can help build a base of informed citizenship and improve the democratic process.
The other two articles will focus on two particular instruments of the application, discussing various interesting aspects related to them that brought quite an array of reactions from the public.
openparlamento.it is a rather complex web application, where citizens can gather detailed informations on the proceedings of the acts presented by the elected officials at national level.
It allows one to follow an act in its path across the two perfectly symmetrical chambers (La Camera and Il Senato), from its presentation as a proposal, to its final approval.
It tracks all the votations, highlighting rebel voters. It tracks who presented an act, and wether as a first-signer or a co-signer. It also tracks speeches of officials on given acts.
Access to textual documents related to an act is easy and documents can be emended by users online, using an innovative shared comments system (eMend), that allows discussions on a particular act to take place.
Users can describe the acts, using their own words, in a wiki subsystem, acts are ratable and commentable, too.
All acts are tagged with consistent arguments by an editorial board, and that allows to know what’s going on and who’s doing what in relation to a subject.
An event-handling subsystem allows the generation of news. Whenever an act is presented, it moves towards approval or refusal, a votation takes place, someone gives a speech or anything worth noticing happens, news are generated. A dedicated web page and a customized daily e-mail, containing just the news related to those acts, politicians or arguments monitored by the user, allows him/her to follow almost in real time what’s going on.
Monitoring arguments is the most remarkable activity. Being time- and resources-consuming it is also not for free, though. A payment model is being discussed with the users during this free-demo phase, and we hope to come to reasonable commercial terms.
openparlamento.it sits on the shoulders of giants, those giants being TheyWorkForYou and OpenCongress.
The idea of materializing all the principles regarding the transparency of elected officials’ activities into a live web site was what we grabbed from those projects.
In Italy, public scrutiny is invoked as a distant and impossible principle. It is left to the official media and it is usually strongly biased, especially when it comes to the political arena.
We wanted to build a place on the web where citizens could inform themselves, controlling the activities of elected officials in the national parliament.
We asked ourselves: what if citizens could comment, rate and describe with their own words the acts presented by their representatives at La Camera and Il Senato? What if people could vote these acts so you can compare elected officials’ and citizens’ votes in the same context?
More than that, we wanted to give the public a tool that could help to understand a bit better what’s being done in the parliament and who’s doing what, and to possibly jump in the process, too. Uncensored.
That is one of the pillars of powerful lobbying: to know the real connections between the informations.
And that’s what we wanted the project to be: just a block of a series of tools that allowed for an improved relation between the represented and the representatives.
to be continued …
Posted in Projects | No Comments »
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20. April 2009 – 13:44 by Danish Technological Institute
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by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Danish Technological Institute
Much has been reported about the successful campaigning, fund raising and support canvassing by the 2008 Obama election campaign. Still the use of ICT to increase electoral participation, campaigning, consultation and voting is not a uniquely US phenomena. A multitude of eParticipation and eDemocracy initiatives exist. Ranging from eVoting in Estonia’s and Geneva’s national and regional elections, gender budgeting in Freiburg, consultation on local issues in Malmö to the political influence of bloggers in China or in the 2008 election crisis in Kenya. Information communication technology (ICT) in other words plays an increasingly important role in society.
As South Africans go to the polling stations on 22 April 2009, campaigning is being played out in traditional media (TV, radio, print), on the internet, on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, in text messages/sms’s with street banners and in rallies across the country.
A full 173 parties – 134 at national level plus 39 purely provincial parties – are officially registered for the 2009 elections. Of these the four main ones are (alphabetic order):
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ANC – African National Congress and currently in power with the support, in a tripartite alliance, of the smaller South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
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COPE – Congress of the People in 2008 by formed members of the ANC
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DA – Democratic Alliance and currently the official opposition
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IFP – Inkatha Freedom Party a mainly regional party centered on the province of KwaZulu-Natal
Each of the main parties makes use of ICT in some form and in variety of ways and degrees. The table below outlines the use of websites and social networks (or Web2.0 technologies). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in News, Tools, Trends, Visions | 6 Comments »
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15. April 2009 – 09:39 by Centre for E-Government
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CALL FOR PAPERS EDEM09 http://edem2009.ocg.at/
2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy
7.-8.9.2009 University of Economics and Business Administration Vienna, Austria
Submissions deadline: 17 May 2009 Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in members, News, TuTech | No Comments »
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4. December 2008 – 12:59 by Danish Technological Institute
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Received a piece of news concerning a new international conference on eParticipation which may be of interest to you.
As some of you probably know, 2009 will be the first time, ePart, a new International Conference on eParticipation (www.demo-net.org/epart), will take place following the 8th international EGOV conference 2009 (part of the DEXA conference cluster, www.dexa.org). ePart is dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy. ePart will take place 3-4 September 2009 in Linz (AT), i.e. right after EGOV conference 30 August to 2 September 2009 with which ePart will be co-located.
A call for papers and workshops/panels is published for both the 2009 ePart and (EGOV www.egov-conference.org/egov-2009).
Contributions may be in the form of scientific papers (distinguishing between completed research and ongoing research), project presentations, and workshops. Each format encourages scientific rigor and discussions of the state-of-the-art, innovative research in progress, studies of practical eGovernment/eGovernance, eParticipation and eDemocracy projects, as well as system implementations.
Accepted papers will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Ongoing research and project papers will be published in the Trauner (Linz, AT) proceedings.
Important dates include:
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Submission of papers: 28 February 2009
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Submission of workshop/panel proposals: 15 April 2009
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Submission of PhD projects: 15 April 2009
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Notification of acceptance for papers: 15 April 2009
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Notification of workshops/panels/PhD projects: 15 May 2009
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EGOV conference: 30 August to 2 September 2009
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ePart conference: 3-4 September 2009
Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Danish Technological Institute
Posted in News, TuTech | No Comments »
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14. November 2008 – 17:17 by Danish Technological Institute
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Dear Colleagues,
Many of you may already know the European Journal of ePractice (EjeP), but do you know that the next special edition is devoted entirely to eParticipation!
The 6th issue of the Journal provides a good chance to write articles based on our work and experiences and provide an excellent opportunity to public, disseminate and most importantly to exchange experiences and ideas.
Launched in November 2007 the Journal belongs to the ePractice.eu community and is sponsored by the European Commission as part of its good practice exchange activity and is run by an independent Editorial Board.
The aim of the Journal is to reinforce the visibility of articles as well as that of professionals while strengthen the overall ePractice.eu activity. The Journal promotes the diffusion and exchange of good practice in eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion and is available to all potential readers free of charge. The Journal currently has an audience of 50,000 professionals in Europe and beyond, and build on a community of some 14,000 members.
The deadline is 8 December, but I know that the editor for the eParticipation issue Jeremy Millard can be pursuaded to extent the deadline till the second half of December if asked nicely. Relevant links are provided below.
Call: http://www.epracticejournal.eu/info/11
Submission guidelines: http://www.epracticejournal.eu/guidelines
European Journal of ePractice: http://www.epracticejournal.eu/home
Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Danish Technological Insitute
Posted in good practice, News | No Comments »
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23. October 2008 – 09:39 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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This years conference season is filled with very interesting events and the Forum in the Future of Democracy held by the Council of Europe in Madrid on October 15th to 17th was surely on of them. This regular event is aimed at covering a wide range of different topics connected to the future of democracy and this year’s tagline was: eDemocracy – Who dares? With this provocative theme at hand and with the long list of very interesting invited speakers and participants this year’s forum was set up to be a success. I would like to share a few of my personal impressions and highlights of the event besides the wonderful weather in Madrid.
The keynote of one of the founders of Skype who is now working both in the academic and the social sector on the first day of the conference made is clear that the topic of eDemocracy has matured and is seen as being very important beyond the core group of enthusiasts. The large number of attendees representing public administrations and EU and national organizations also supports this point and shows that many of the decision-makers in the different branches of government have picked up the topic and are moving forward.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in TuTech | 2 Comments »
