Open Source Software and Public Trust in eVoting 14. April 2009 – 09:53 by CTI

Democratic societies of today face the challenge of upgrading public dialogue and reinforcing citizens’ participation in decision making, thus passing from an e-government to an e-governance model. eVoting is an important aspect of this effort, while at the same time is one of the most controversial issues at a technological, political and social level. A basic precondition for the maturity and acceptance of eVoting systems is the establishment of trust for their users. Read the rest of this entry »

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Uniting the Open Source efforts in eParticipation 29. July 2008 – 08:42 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

Almost all eParticipation projects are combinations of social methods and some sort of web based technology. At the BerlininJuly summit 2008 we discussed the aspect of open source technology for eParticipation which lead to some interesting thoughts and conclusions.

In many cases the persons developing these technologies want to share their ideas and advances with the greater eParticipation community. To do so some of them publish the work as open source projects which can be reused under some sort of open licence like the GPL. There are different ways to store the actual code of the software and manage open source projects from the technical side like Sourceforge or Google Code. These services do their job extremely well but they are scattered around the net and not specifically aimed at the topic of eParticipation.

On the other hand organizations looking into using eParticipation tools and methods are often confronted with the problem that they need to develop both the method and the technology needed and are not aware of already existing open source projects offering a solution. As a result many technologies are reinvented in different countries and different contexts even so the fitting technology would have been available. Read the rest of this entry »

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Stet helps you to discuss texts with a lot of people 3. June 2008 – 09:00 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

In eParticipation efforts there is often the need to discuss and edit texts with a larger group of persons. They may be drafts of law texts, papers for parliaments or even recommendations for urban planning. This kind of work is often problematic and needs special attention by those who conduct eParticipation on a larger scale. The Free-Software-Foundation faced the same problems when they invited the citizens of the net to take part in the development of the GNU-GPL licence 3, which is the newest version of the most used open source software licence. For example the Firefox browser is partly licensed under GNU-GPL and its own version of it the Mozilla public licence.

To cope with this task the Foundation developed a small but efficient tool called Stet which of course is free software itself. It allows readers to comment on specific parts of a text and provides graphical help to let readers keep track of the discussion. An example for this tool in action is the discussion about the GLPv3 licence. The trick is that all comments are shown directly next to the parts they refer to and not beneath the text. The colouring helps to additionally structure the comments so that every reader can see immediately which part produces the most controversy.

As Stet is free software everyone can use it in other contexts. This tool could be very useful in different eParticipation projects which involve the discussion of a document of any sort.

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