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3. March 2010 – 13:38 by John Heaven
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My name is John Heaven and I started work at TuTech Innovation on 1st March 2010. I will be working on - amongst other things - PEP-NET. Part of my role will be to work together with Bengt Feil on establishing what members would like to get out of PEP-NET membership, how we can improve what we offer to them, and ultimately ensure that PEP-NET can support itself into the future.
But before I set about that, I thought maybe you’d like to hear about where I’m from and what I’ve been doing until now, especially around eParticipation!
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Posted in Uncategorized, good practice | 4 Comments »
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6. January 2010 – 13:14 by Bengt Feil
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Augmented reality on iPhone (Wikipedia)
Locations and places play in very important role in many eParticipation processes. As a matter of fact eParticipation in urban planning is one of the most successful areas eParticipation to day. In the case of participation processes which are linked to a certain place mobile participation is a very promising trend in general and in this article I would like to take a look at two specific new technologies and what their use in mobile location focussed participation may be: Augmented reality and automated image recognition.
Augmented reality
In a nutshell the term augmented reality describes the enhancement of a live picture provided by camera (mostly on phones) with additional data (commonly gathered from the internet). The data shown is located in space so that the viewer only sees the data he or she is close to. The picture above for example is an example using the Wikitude world browser on the iPhone. Here the live view is enhanced with data from Wikipedia. This kind of technology is available on most location aware smart phones today and is very easy to use. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends | 1 Comment »
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10. December 2009 – 12:52 by Rolf Luehrs
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This is the second article about the evaluation of eParticipation projects and their role in participatory democracy, which will be posted by the members of the TuTech team over the course of the next weeks. The first one by Bengt Feil can be found here.
Quantity matters - especially for everything related to the Internet. Just think of the exploding internet penetration rates throughout the recent decades, dizzying stock prices during the new economy or the number of weblogs counted by Technorati.
Since the term web 2.0 has been coined we are flooded by incredibly huge numbers of social network users everyday and only since Obama has managed to mobilise millions of people via the Internet public administrations and politicians seem to consider the participatory potential of the Internet seriously.
However, the flipside of the obsession with scale is that not enough attention is paid to the quality of citizen participation on the Internet. Is a project or service really valuable just because tenth or even hundreds of thousands of users were using it? What does the sheer fact that lots of people wrote to their MP via the Internet or participated in a online petition tells about the contribution of this service to the improvement of political culture or decisions? Or the other way round: Is a political discussion of a certain subject irrelevant just because just a few hundred people participated?
I believe that counting heads or contributions is not a sufficient measure to evaluate what eParticipation can do for Democracy. Even worse, to only stare at numbers obstructs the view to the core strengths of eParticipation like providing a space to express and shape opinions, to exchange arguments, to collaboratively work or create and being heard by political and administrative decision makers.
Still, quantity matters, but for different types of eParticipation to an entirely different extend. If we look ad crowd sourcing-like projects in the political realm it is reasonable to assume that the more citizens participate the better the results will be. If e.g. a public administration wants to learn more about the actual quality and state of streets, buildings and places it would help a lot if as many participants as possible send their comments, photos or videos. But if the same PA asked citizens for proposals on how to more efficiently spend tax payer’s money, the quality of these proposal counts in the first place.
It has been demonstrated quite a few times that deliberative Internet discussions can lead to concrete results, that these results were amplified by traditional media and finally led to better policies. Some of these cases have been introduced here on PEP-NET (1, 2, 3) and none of them managed to attract huge numbers of active participants.
Rather than trying to realise sort of mass-deliberation on particular policies we should try to increase the number of eParticipatory opportunities. A model for this could be the so-called “Long Tail” describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. Chris Anderson showed that products which are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current blockbusters. Transferred to the eParticipation domain this would offer the opportunity to achieve high overall participation rates while keeping up a good deliberative quality in the particular projects.
Posted in Projects, Trends, TuTech, Visions | 15 Comments »
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3. December 2009 – 15:37 by Bengt Feil
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This is the first in series of article on the role on the evaluation of eParticipation projects and their role in participatory democracy, which will be posted by the members of the TuTech team over the course of the next weeks.
There is a general agreement among many actors in democratic societies that there is a lack of possibilities for political participation. New media and the internet especially have been heralded as solutions to this problem and while eParticipation cannot replace other forms of participation and solve the democratic deficit once and for all it can help to improve the overall democratic culture in a society.
A strong democracy has to offer different participatory processes to answer a variety of needs of both citizens and government bodies. An election for example is excellent in involving almost the whole population in a decision making process but is very restrictive in its options (e.g. parties and people to vote for) and does not facilitate deliberation. A public hearing on the other hand can only be attended by a relatively small number of people but offers an open space to discuss many different options and develop compromises in collaboration. One cannot state that one form of political participation is “better” than the other but both processes answer specific needs by citizens and government and contribute to the democratic culture at large.
To support the before mentioned point there is the need to discusses what kind of dimensions can be used to categorize a participation process. The following list of dimensions (which will be picked up in following articles) is be no means complete but shows how many different variables have to be taken into account to understand the different forms of participation processes:
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Posted in Tools, Trends | 3 Comments »
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30. November 2009 – 11:04 by Bengt Feil
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Over the course of the last few weeks there was a lot of noise about Google Wave and its potential to transform everything from newspapers to novel writing. The Wave approach, which consists of both a tool and a underlying protocol, has be discussed as being the solution that will unite online communication and therefore revolutionize the web at the same time as it has been described as being complicated and not very useful.
I wrote an overview about the tool and the Wave protocol earlier on this blog and promised to take a look at its possible implications for eParticipation. Luckily Tim Bonnemann started a discussion on how to use Google Wave for eParticipation using the tool itself as soon at it was available. If you have a Wave account you can be view it here. In this article I will try to give the major points which have been made in that discussion. All the ideas presented in this text have been developed collaboratively by the 59 people have signed into this Wave until now. Thanks to all the contributors and especially Tim for starting the Wave!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends, Visions | 2 Comments »
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24. November 2009 – 16:59 by POLITECH
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Have you ever wondered what the European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament (EP) do to diminish the democratic deficit in the EU and to involve the citizens into decision-making processes of the European Union? You can now see for yourself and participate in one of the most important events of 2009.
The projects co-funded by the EC under the eParticipation Preparatory Action are organising an eParticipation Conference, which will be held in Brussels on Tuesday, 15th of December 2009 at the European Parliament (Rue Wiertz 60, 1047 Brussels, Belgium, Room A.3E2) .
The development and wide use of powerful new ICT applications is transforming the way citizens and civil society interact, debate and participate in public life. These new tools have enormous potential to enhance decision-making processes by involving large numbers of EU citizens.
As the eParticipation Preparatory Action, an initiative of the European Parliament launched in 2006, reaches its conclusion, this eParticipation Conference is being organized to demonstrate progress and results in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to enhance citizens’ participation in democratic decision-making. In parallel, there will be an exhibition of project results produced in the context of the Preparatory Action. This is a unique one-time opportunity to see all the projects in one place and to engage into a conversation with projects’ leaders and representatives.
Register to the conference before 10 December 2009 at: http://eparticipation.eventbrite.com (registration password: momentum)
Note: The Conference is free, but only registered delegates will be allowed entry for security reasons. All the participants should have some type of identification documents (for EU nationals - passports or national ID; for people from outside of the EU - valid passport documents are necessary).
For further information, please visit: www.ep-momentum.eu or contact: momentum@atc.gr
Posted in Events | No Comments »
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29. October 2009 – 09:22 by Rolf Luehrs
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German journalist proposed innovative eParticipation project – or is it just a weird idea?
Until recently Berlin Tempelhof Airport was one of the world’s oldest still-operating commercial airports. After 85 years in operation and a failed referendum against its closure, the airport shut down in October 2008.
But what to do with a former airport area in the middle of Berlin? Round about 340 hectares empty land in the centre of one of Europe’s largest cities – isn’t this an exciting opportunity for urban development and spatial planning?
View Larger Map
And Berlin is discussing about possible uses for quiet a while and lots of proposals have already been put on the table. Even some participatory planning instruments have been applied like a web-based participation process.
However, it is still unclear how the future use will look like or how an inclusive and sustainable planning process could be designed and implemented.
In today’s edition of the German newspaper “die tageszeitung” (taz), the journalist Gereon Asmuth came up with an interesting proposal. The territory comprises round about 3,4 Million square metres and Berlin counts 3.4 Million inhabitants he reckons. Why not giving one square metre ex-airport to every inhabitant and let her or him decide what to do with it?
There are not to much possibilities to develop one square metre land, but the more citizens co-operate and support the same idea, the bigger projects could be realised. An football ground for instance would need 7.500 m2, a new central park 400.000 co-operating citizens to become reality. The entire negotiation and planning should be done using the Internet.
Sure, there are a lot of organisational and even legal problems to overcome if this approach was chosen: Should even children be eligible to participate or just voters? How could we prevent potential investors from buying the land from hundred of thousand of citizens? etc.
However, I still think this is a fascinating proposal and I have never heard about something similar. Or is it just a weird idea?
Posted in News, Projects, Tools, Trends, Visions | 1 Comment »
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15. October 2009 – 16:12 by Madarász Csaba
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Most of us has heard about the 5th Ministerial Conference and pre-conference taking place in Malmö late November. However the top politicians are forming the agenda of e-government development, the sound of experts and citizens could be also heard in the same city - and of course over the waves of the net.
Beside the fact, that the Open Declaration on Public Services will be presented on the Ministerial conference, another conference , the “popular Malmo09 event aims to offer a memorable creative statement of what Europeans really want from e-enabled government.”
Taking place at the beautiful location of the Garaget, organizers are offering a wide space for engagement and opinion forming and an artistic presence. In their own words:
Anyone interested is welcome to apply to speak, participate contribute ideas or help in any other way. It is particularly aimed at European digital-rights organisations, consumer advocates, and those with a political, academic, artistic or design interest in e-government. No presentation will last longer than eight minutes. Music, pictures and video content is welcome. The event will close with awards for the “pertinent art” which best expresses popular feeling about e-government, and for the best independently coded or mashed-up projects based on public data or public services.
Please spread the call for artwork you can download it here:
The conference is supported by
mydex.org
farmsubsidy.org
mysociety.org
socialinnovationexchange.org
and ctrl+shift
www.malmo09.org
Posted in Events, News, Projects | No Comments »
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29. September 2009 – 15:46 by Olga Lacigova - 21c
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Just 100 days before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Fondation Sophia Antipolis, a partner of the WAVE project, will be hosting a breakfast meeting entitled:
Reduction of Greenhouse Gases: How to Intensify the Efforts?
The meeting will take place on Friday 16th October 2009 at 9am at the Picasso room - Place Sophie Laffitte - Fondation Sophia Antipolis
The breakfast aims to:
- Discuss the emergency of the climate change topic with involved actors such as politicians, NGO, scientists, civil servants etc.
- Launch the French WAVE website (www.debatclimat.eu) and introduce the innovative argument visualisation tool – the DebateGraph – to the community
- Reinforce the participation of citizens in the legislative and decisional process within the parliaments and governments
The WAVE project co-funded by the European Commission – aims to improve the inclusiveness and transparency of EU decision making at the national and European level by using highly integrated, state-of-the-art Argument Visualisation techniques to make the impact of complex EU environmental legislation on climate change more accessible and easy to understand for citizens, special interest groups and decision makers alike.
For more information and to register, please contact Farouk Raïs at: rais@sophia-antipolis.org / www.sophia-antipolis.org /+33 (0) 4 92 96 78 05
Posted in Events, Projects, Tools | No Comments »
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16. September 2009 – 22:45 by University Bergamo
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In the next days in Italy there will be some relevant events for researchers, decision makers, activists, ordinary citizens, interested in the state of the public debate about Internet, democracy and participation, particularly in this country, where even freedom of information has recently become an hot issue (see the petition launched by La Repubblica, which has gathered more than 370.000 signature in two weeks, and the demonstration announced for saturday 19th September in the capital.
The annual conference of the Italian Society of Political Science (SISP) will be held 17th-19th September at the LUISS University in Rome. This edition has a very rich program, and many interesting panels are directly or indirectly related to e-participation (for an overview see the conference website (http://www.sisp.it/convegno ). Particularly worth of attention is the panel about Citizenship rights and new digital environment. To acknowledge the centrality of the institutional contexts - too much often neglected in the discourse about e-democracy- is a fruitful way to frame the problem of citizens participation in the Internet era. Among the speakers the panel includes Francesco Amoretti (Professor of International relations, University of Salerno), Carlo Formenti (Professor of Sociology of new media, University of Salento), Claudia Padovani (Professor of International communication, University of Padova) and Stefano Rodotà (Professor of Law, University La Sapienza - Rome, and former National Authority on data and privacy protection). As a leading scholar of the Italian studies about network-society, Rodotà has advanced the proposal of an Internet Bill of rights at the WSIS of Athens (2006), then included in the agenda of the Internet Governance Forum.
The range of issues arisen along the panel is wide and very relevant: privacy and ’securization’ of the cyberspace, human rights and digital exclusion, public policies focusing information society, privatization of the online public sphere, but also opportunity to support emancipatory approaches within digital communities. According to the abstracts, the need of a new affirmation of the fundamental citizens rights (from civil ones to, I would add, social rights) on the Internet emerges as a crucial variable for the development of the democratic potential of the new media. The prevailing pessimistic worry about the current international situation emerging from the panel makes more relevant the (need of) possible role of civil society and citizens in re-addressing the political agenda. In this direction, the diffusion of a more mature awareness of the Internet social, political and economic dimensions is essential.
On the side of the civil society initiatives, it is worth of attention the third edition of the event “Condividi la conoscenza” (“Share the knowledge”), organized by a wide Italian network of activists, practitioners/stakeholders of free/open licensing: ICT professionals and entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists, associations devoted to digital rights, ICT researchers, teachers. Condividi3 will be hosted at the University of Milano on 23 September. The issue of free knowledge is the core-value of this civil society network. The different panels will deal with the benefits of open and free contents and software in fields like public administration, universities, public libraries, small enterprises, associations, etc. This is a very important aspect strictly connected to the pre-conditions of (e)participation, giving evidence to the continuity among the opportunities of social, cultural and political participation.
Posted in Events | No Comments »
