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30. April 2009 – 16:40 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Dear readers,
This is the second issue of the PEP-NET newsletter. This newsletter contains:
- A look back at this year’s conference marathon
- Upcoming events
- Selected articles from the PEP-NET blog
The conference marathon
The last two months have been busy for the European eParticipation community with a series of important events taking place all over Europe. PEP-NET members were present at these events and are reporting back in a number of articles on the blog:
- The eGovernment Ministerial conference took place in Malmoe. The results of this event will have major impact on the next years of development in eGovernment and eParticipation.
- Alongside the eGovernment Ministerial conference the first popular eGovernment Unconference took place.
- The first Personal Democracy Forum Europe was held in Barcelona and Rolf Luehrs shares his thoughts on the event.
- PEP-NET hosted a session and a workshop at the Future-Democracy 09 in London.
- Renate Mitterhuber shares here thoughts on the Gartner Symposium/ITXPO 2009 in Cannes.
- The empowerment of women online has been the topic of an interview done by Rolf Luehrs at the World e-Democracy Forum.
Upcoming events
The month of December is much quieter when it comes to conferences. However there is one interesting eParticipation event: On December 15th the Momentum team will host the eParticipation Conference: Current State of Play & Future Directions in Brussels. Furthermore the call for papers for the EDem conference in May 2010 in Krems has been published.
Selected articles from the PEP-NET blog
Adapting to climate change using eParticipation?
The tools of eParticipation are not restricted to participation in political processes but can also be used in other contexts. An example is the Klimzug Nord project in Germany which aims at developing strategies to adapt to climate change in metropolitan areas and incorporates affected citizens and organisations through the use of online tools.
Read the whole article
(e) Participatory Budgeting in Germany
Like in other European countries participatory budgeting is one of the most prominent examples of citizen participation in politics in Germany. More than 115 municipalities or cities are currently about to implement or have already implemented participatory budgeting projects. This article provides an overview of the development and the situation in Germany.
Read the whole article
10 principles for a Public Administration 2.0
The Italian discourse about the need for public administrations to embrace the possibilities of ICT has produced a very interesting list of ten key principles for the modern and connected public administration.
Read the 10 principles here.
Managing opensource for e-participation
eParticipation tools are developed under many different circumstances and you can find sophisticated open source solutions among them. This article poses and answers a series of questions related to the use of opensource software in eParticipation.
Read the whole article.
All the best from:
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| Rolf Luehrs,
PEP-NET Coordinator |
Bengt Feil |
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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30. April 2009 – 13:38 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Dear readers,
It has already been planned for quite a while and now here it is: the very first issue of our monthly PEP-NET Newsletter!
- What’s new at PEP-NET?
- PEP-NET in numbers
- Upcoming Conferences and Events
- Selected postings on our blog
What’s new at PEP-NET?
As some of you have already heard we have successfully passed our midterm review by the European Commission. As a project partly funded by the European Commission we had to show that we achieved what has been promised in our contract. After having read our deliverables and listened to our presentation the reviewers stated that the project has made “Excellent progress and fully achieved its objectives and goals for the period and has even exceeded expectations”. Cheers!
This result is of course just motivating us to perform even better. As a first step we have now addressed is multilingualism on our blog. All our members are from now on encouraged to write also or only in their mother tongue. Read more about our hopes and expectations behind that move here.
PEP-NET in numbers
PEP-NET has currently 43 member organisations, 6 of which are Public Administrations, 12 belong to the third sector (NGO’s, Citizen Organisations), 18 are scientists or researchers and 25 are solution providers. (Apparently some belong to more than one group).
Our Facebook Page has now 233 fans and is growing quickly. We also looked at our fan base for some information. Almost 60% are working for different kinds of companies, 20% of the fans are scientists or students, 8% are journalists, 6% belong to public administrations, 4% are politicians and 2% are NGO’s representatives.
On Twitter 357 people are following us, on FriendFeed just 29. All in all we are more than happy with all the people from the different domains and countries who showed interest in our network. But we still want to grow PEP-NET.
If anybody wants to help us, why don’t you just tell the world about PEP-NET? Or if you have a Facebook account we were really happy for you to suggest your friends to become a fan: just go the page and click on “suggest to friends” on the left side menu.
Upcoming Conferences and Events
1. Berlin in October, e-democracy summit 15th -16th October 2009, Berlin, Germany http://berlininoctober.e-demokratie.org/
2. World edemocracy Forum 22nd – 23rd October 2009, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris, France http://www.edemocracy-forum.com/
3. Venezia Camp 2009, 24th October, Venice, Italy
http://www.veneziacamp.it/eventi/barcamp/
Selected articles on the PEP-NET blog
Digital Democracy for All?
Julia Glidden discusses the decision of Tom Steinberg (MySociety.org) to advise the conservative party in the UK. The article and the related comments point out both, the potential of Tom’s involvement as well as the possible problems for MySociety.org.
Read the whole article
A huge demonstration in defence of freedom of information in Italy. The Internet’s role in the mobilization.
The acfgroup of the University of Bergamo talks about the role of the internet and social media in the organisation of real world protest which have an impact on the political decision making process. About 300.000 citizen went to the streets of Rome to defend freedom of information and the event was mainly organised using the web.
Read the whole article
How democratic countries try to control the Internet
Internet censorship and surveillance is not just a problem of dictatorships around the world but is also happening in democractic countries. This is the central argument made by Simone Gerdesmeier and Hans Hagedorn of Zebralog in their featured article. They provide an overview of the cases of online censorship in the US and European countries and provide and insight into the political disucssions and protests related to these cases.
Read the whole article
Online vote for Public Prize: European eGovernment Awards practice what we preach…
The Danish Technological Institute asks all visitors of the PEP-NET blog and readers of this newsletter to vote in the online vote for the European eGovernment Awards. Five of the persons voting for the projects will gain free admission to the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Malmo in Novemeber 2009.
Read the whole article
All the best from:
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Rolf Luehrs,
PEP-NET Coordinator |
Bengt Feil |
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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1. July 2008 – 15:37 by Danish Technological Institute
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As you may already be aware the European Commission (DG Information Society and Media) funded eParticipation Study – titled “Study and supply of services on the development of eParticipation in the EU” – is currently underway and in this connection the first wave of deliverable has now been prepared and submitted to the EC and a group of external peer reviewer (see www.european-eparticipation.eu for further details).
Deliverables include:
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Major factors shaping the development of eParticipation (D1.1a)
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Key actors in the EU in the field of eParticipation (D1.2a)
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Main benefits of the eParticipation developments in the EU (D1.3a)
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Mapping the state of play in eParticipation in the EU (D1.4a)
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First post-workshop report (D3.1b)
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Framework for eParticipation good practice (D4.1a)
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First newsletter (D6.3a)
In addition the following deliverables will be available end of July:
This first wave of deliverables will be updated for the next deliverables wave expected in October/November 2008. The second version of each deliverable will take into account comments by the European Commission and the project’s peer review group as well as further work conducted by the Consortium Partners in the intervening period.
You may view all deliverables in the publications/public deliverables section on www.european-eparticipation.eu or directly on http://195.251.218.37/eP//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=2
Please note that we are continuously looking for people with involvement or experience in eParticipation at the European level who will be able to guide use to relevant eParticipation initiatives, projects, events, etc. We are especially interested in examples at the European level, that may be considered as good practice, or from which lessons can be learned.
If you have not already done so, you may wish to register for the eParticipation and eDemocracy Network on http://www.epractice.eu/community/eParticipation.
Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Business and Policy Analysis, Danish Technological Institute
Posted in News, Projects | No Comments »
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30. April 2008 – 12:11 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Dear Readers,
Welcome to the March edition of the PEP-NET newsletter, the first in 2010. We’ve got news of the second PEP-NET discourse, a brand new “success story” feature, news of some new arrivals to PEP-NET, a reminder about the EDem10 conference, and a round-up of activity on the blog.
Do not forget that we don’t just communicate by newsletter: you can keep up-to-date with us through the news digests on the blog, blog posts and discussions on the Facebook page.
PEP-NET discourse
The second PEP-NET discourse is fast approaching and preparations are already underway to ensure that it runs smoothly. The theme of the discourse will be “eParticipation in the new EU member states”. Participants from new EU member states with a background in eParticipation and participation in general will discuss opportunities, barriers and issues relating to eParticipation in the new member states. The three-phase discourse, which will make use of the existing DEMOS platform, is scheduled to commence on 12th April, and will run for two weeks.
PEP-NET success story
We’ve decided to start showcasing PEP-NET members as a regular feature in the newsletter. This will give you the chance to get to know a little bit about interesting people and organisations that are active in eParticipation and also to find out why they find PEP-NET so useful. We’d love to feature more PEP-NET members in the future, so if you are a PEP-NET member please get in touch if you would like to take this opportunity to step into the limelight.
In this issue we’re going to introduce Noella Edelmann from the Danube University in Austria.
For PEP-NET members, perhaps the most relevant part of Noella’s job is marketing the Centre for eGovernment as a project partner and finding new projects for the Centre to participate in. As a researcher, Noella focuses on eParticipation, Open Access, internet and psychology, and user experience. She is also the Managing Editor of JEDEM, the Open Access eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (www.jedem.org) and is responsible for EDEM, the annual eDemocracy Conference that is also featured in this issue.
Noella sees PEP-NET as an opportunity to make contacts, find sources of information, exchange and generate new ideas, and identify opportunities for new projects – all of which are central to her work at the Danube University Krems.
Some examples of how PEP-NET has helped her and her organisation are the upcoming PEP-NET special edition of the JEDEM journal, the PEP-NET workshop at the EDEM 2010 conference and the successful bid with other PEP-NET members for the EC-funded project “Your Space”.
Selected articles on the PEP-NET blog
Here are a few selected articles published on the PEP-NET blog in February and March:
• In “Generation X, Y or Z?”, the Centre for E-Government compares the characteristics of three generations with a focus on their use of digital communication tools. • Francesco Molinari announced an Electronic Town Meeting, which took place on 6th February. Although the meeting has already happened, the article is a useful brief introduction to the concept: “Tuscan citizens reflecting on the limits of landscape policy.”
• Bengt Feil wrote several articles about collecting distributed opinions from across the web: “Empowering Politicians through crowd sourcing? – ThinkTank and Expert Labs,” “The Social Graph: Identifying statements by the same person on the web,” “Google Buzz, Twitter and Blogs: Identifying distributed public opinions.”
• Fraser Henderson wrote about the National Digital Inclusion Conference in the UK: “Digital Inclusion Confusion”. Amongst other things he prophesised that the digital inclusion problem will solve itself in the long-term.
New arrivals
John Heaven has started work for TuTech Innovation GmbH, the co-ordinator of PEP-NET. He will be working with Bengt Feil to ensure that PEP-NET continues to be a success.
Since the last newsletter several new associate members have joined PEP-NET. They are:
• European Institute for Public Participation (http://www.participationinstitute.org)
• ActValue Consulting and Solutions (http://www.actvalue.com/)
• The Democratic Society (http://demsoc.org)
• echo source (http://echologic.org)
• liberTIC ()http://www.liber-tic.com)
• Regione Toscana (http://www.regione.toscana.it)
Want to become a PEP-NET member?
Find out how at http://pep-net.eu/becoming-a-member
All the best from:
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1. January 2007 – 11:02 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Dear Reader,
As an expert or practitioner in the field of civic engagement, the Pan European eParticipation Network would like to invite you to participate in an online discourse about electronic Participation in Central and Eastern Europe.
The discourse starts today and you can go to www.internet-discourse.eu to take part (or go directly to http://www.internet-discourse.eu/demos.php?&page=new_author to register). eParticipation and civic engagement practitioners from Central, Eastern and Western Europe will discuss a wide range of issues: from opportunities and challenges, to the structural, political and cultural problems that may stand in the way of successful eParticipation in the region.
The focus of the discourse will be the development of strategies to enhance eParticipation in Central and Eastern Europe and overcome the obstacles identified. The final outcome of the discourse will be a paper, describing the situation of eParticipation in the region and making recommendations for improvement, which will be presented to the European Commission and other influencers of eParticipation.
The discourse is broken down into three phases: “broadening”, “deepening” and “consolidating”. In the broadening phase, ideas and possible topics for discussion are fielded. Some of these are then selected for a more in-depth discussion in the “deepening” phase. This means that you can decide what is discussed before you discuss it. The final phase, “consolidating”, aims to summarize the results of the discussionand to highlight both areas where consensus has been achieved as well as those where different view points remained, resulting in a situation paper. The whole discussion is moderated by a dedicated team, so you can engage in a constructive and structured discussion.
This is the second of three PEP-NET discourses. The first discourse was successfully held in early 2009 as a support action for the European eParticipation Study.
We look forward to reading your contributions on internet-discourse.eu!
We kindly request you to forward this message to any person who might be interested in getting involved in this online discourse.
Want to become a PEP-NET member?
Find out how at http://pep-net.eu/becoming-a-member
All the best,
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