Impressions of the eDem 09 conference in Vienna 9. September 2009 – 15:49 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

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.

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