There is an urgent need to address the issue of cyber warfare attacks on the US, according to Janet Napolitano, US Homeland Security Secretary: “US urges ‘action’ needed to fight net attacks”, BBC News website.

For those who can read German, an article by Nina Schröter on politik digital (one of PEP-NET’s founding members) rounds up the news around online politics in Germany. Issues addressed include the German Constitutional Court’s ruling on mass collection of citizens’ data and the Chaos-Computer-Club’s call for an annual “Datenbrief”, a letter to citizens outlining what information is held about them and what it is used for: “Links, zwo, drei, vier“.

Involve, an associate member of PEP-NET, has co-published a literature review of participation, including eParticipation: “Understanding Participation: A Literature Review” (PDF file).

This article has already been linked from a PEP-NET article (”Internet can be muzzled?“) but I thought it worthy of another mention. It’s about Belarussian plans to introduce a law to control more strictly public agencies’ use of the internet. “Belarusian government increases its control over the Internet”, by PEP-NET associate member e-belarus.org

Michael Grimes of the Citizenship Foundation, based in the UK, contributed a thought-provoking article to Savvy Citizens: “Using the internet for effective citizenship”.

Jon Bounds, a chum of mine from Birmingham and renowned social media expert, wrote an article about the implications of social media for the Olympics and how social media threaten their ability to raise revenue through selling rights to their logo. He draws on examples from the recent Winter Olympics including companies who were told off for using the #Olympic hashtag on Twitter: “Hashtags, a new challenge to idiots” by Jon Bounds.

And finally, another social media expert from Birmingham Andrew Brightwell posted some FAQs about social media surgeries for people thinking of coming along. In case you are wondering what a social media surgery is, this post will tell you all you need to know. You might even want to try organising one! “What’s it like to go to your first Social Media Surgery?” by Andrew Brightwell on Podnosh

In due dense giornate internazionali di lavoro l’Università di Perugia propone un’occasione preziosa di riflessione e confronto su questi ed altri temi più specifici collegati.

Al link indicato è possibile trovare tutte le indicazioni sull’iniziativa.

“Le Regole della partecipazione. Cultura giuridica e dinamiche istituzionali dei processi partecipativi”.
Università di Perugia, 11-12 Marzo 2010
http://www.unipg.it/convegni/Giurisprudenza-2010/locandina.pdf

Anna Carola Freschi
(Università di Bergamo)

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!

For the past two years I worked at Birmingham City Council, the local government in my home city. I worked in different departments and with a huge number of people from across the city. During my placement at Digital Birmingham, I became involved in social media from several perspectives: working closely with the Director of Communications on a new corporate social media strategy; working with Kate Foley, then Neighbourhood Manager for Lozells, one of Birmingham’s more deprived neighbourhoods; and keeping in regular personal and professional contact with people on Birmingham’s blogging scene.

All of this has given me a good idea of the potential of digital technology to enhance participation in democratic processes, but also of some of the problems — or some may say excuses! — that public sector organisations need to overcome to embrace technology more readily.

So my first PEP-NET contribution is about issues that face local government when engaging with social media. I’ll start off by outlining three problems, then offer some reflection about how to overcome them.

Digital inclusion

This is always a difficult one to counter. It’s true: there are people who lack the skills and equipment to use social media to engage with government. Paper publications and telephone calls don’t make everyone participate, but at least in theory they have had the chance to participate in decisions without being excluded right from the start.

Further, with sophisticated Customer Insight databases that can pinpoint specific demographics and exactly how they like to be communicated with, there are areas where we know digital communications will fall on deaf ears entirely. Why bother?

Internal limitations

Many public agencies continue to use Internet Explorer 6, which often has problems rendering web pages (in the near future many major websites, for example Youtube, will drop support for IE 6 completely) and doesn’t fully support RSS feeds.

Installing third party software is not possible because of security restrictions — so forget Skype and Tweetdeck — and social media sites are blocked during core hours by default. There are even members of staff who have access to the internet blocked. Not all employees have the skills to use social media because they don’t necessarily use them in their personal lives.

On top of all this, a culture of discretion — not putting anything in the public domain unless it’s specifically allowed — means that social media are sometimes perceived as a threat.

How many people actually use it anway?

We’ve all seen blog posts with no comments, Facebook pages with few fans, Twitter accounts that fizzle out after a couple of weeks, and discussion forums that no-one posts on. What’s wrong with tried-and-tested offline participation?

***

Each of the above is an issue that can be overcome, but only with determination. Unfortunately, it suits some people for things to stay as they are: those who do not feel they have the necessary IT skills; those who feel daunted by the prospect of working more openly and being the subject of public scrutiny.

Thankfully, there are people within government — and certainly at Birmingham City Council — who are pushing this agenda because they see that there is a lot of potential in social media. Part of the solution to the above problems is to allow enthusiasts (both within and outside the organisation) to come to the fore and shape an organisation’s approach to social media. Changing an organisation’s culture doesn’t happen overnight, but at least this way an organisation can quickly make the most of its employees’ enthusiasm.

There are good examples of social media enabling people to participate in local government and their local areas: ‘hyper-local blogging’, Big City Talk, Birmingham News Room, and I should also mention Demos-Monitor now that I’m working for TuTech!

Even where groups don’t use social media at the moment, it is important to develop these new channels so that people who are not online develop the ability to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities that digital technology can offer. This doesn’t just allow them to engage with government — which, let’s face it, not everybody wants to — but also to find job opportunities, communicate with their local authority more cheaply, and take advantage of buying stuff cheaply online.

Using Birmingham as an example, social media allows Brummies to tap into a network of businesspeople, university lecturers, local government officials and many more besides. Some may call this an elite, others deride it as the ‘twitterati’. But it is growing in numbers and is an important source of personal and professional contacts. Digital inclusion is all about helping everyone to be part of the twitterati, not about ‘not doing digital’ for fear of being unfair.

It’s a long game, it takes effort, and it’s no panacea. But overcoming the hurdles outlined above is worth it.

The Pilot Websites of the Project have been launched in the UK, France and Lithuania on 16 October 2009, 13 November 2009, and 10 December 2009  respectively. They can be accessed by going to the following websites:

www.debatclimat.eu (French Pilot)

www.jointhewave.org (UK Pilot)

www.wave-diskusijos.lt (Lithuanian Pilot)

The official launch of the first pilot (French Pilot) took place in Sophia Antipolis (France) in the form of Sophia Café which focused on the topic of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How to Intensify the Efforts? The event was organised by the consortium partner Foundation Sophia Antipolis (www.sophia-antipolis.org). It was organised under the patronage of Pierre Laffitte, Honorary Senator and the President of the Foundation Sophia Antipolis.

WAVE was pleased to have an opportunity to present the Project to the audience of 81 event participants and to listen and discuss the ideas and feedback after Laurent Soulier’s (Director of International Relations & and European Affairs at Foundation Sophia Antipolis), David Price’s (Debategraph) and Deirdre Lee’s (DERI) presentations on WAVE and Debategraph, which is a tool used by WAVE.

The text “(e)Participación en el ámbito local. Caminando hacia una democracia colaborativa” deals with citizen participation as it was known during the XX Century.
It analyses its strengths, potential and problems from a critical, irreverent, but nevertheless thoughtful perspective. To illustrate the characteristics of citizen participation, the report provides a comprehensive and original analysis of Participatory Budgeting Experiences of the big brazilian cities (with special emphasis on Porto Alegre and Fortaleza).

Vicious cycle of participation

This text was prizewinner in the last CLAD Congress (the most important Latin-American congress on State Reform and Public Administration Modernization), which took place in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil).

We really expect you will find this report refreshing, and actually hope it will foster interesting reflections from your side.

We are looking forward to another highly international and very interesting event!

Daniel Botz - E-Voting.CC

1. The project started out as a tool to just gather Twitter data and back it up on another server but has since developed into a much larger and more ambitious web app that is able to gather activity related to a specific person or subject from existing social networks and organize this information in a useful fashion. ThinkTank stores all data it gathers in its own database, which makes analysis, filtering and documentation much easier.

2. One use of ThinkTank, which is especially suiting for political participation processes, is that it allows to gather the distributed answers posted to a a specific question on many different social networks. Gina Trapani uses the following example to illustrate the power of this ability: When she decided to buy a Netbook she asked her Twitter followers what the best model etc. is and got over 240 qualified results. „ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses.“

1. Recently Expert Labs, a non-profit independent organisation which tries to „help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens“, has hired Gina Trapani as a project director to work on ThinkTank as a tool in a political context. The idea is to empower politicians and administrative policy makers to make use of the distributed knowledge and expertise represented by citizens in various social networks. In other words: Like Gina was able to ask her savvy Twitter followers about the best Netbook, politicians should be able to ask about the best policy decision and be able to make sense of the answers.

The first test for ThinkTank in the political context will be Grant Challenges initiative by the White House. The tool will be used to gather feedback on the list of scientific and technical challenges identified by the White House. It will be interesting to see how this still rather young open source project hold up to the task but it is great to see that the White House and Expert Labs are willing to make use of such an innovative tool for a real-life test.

The Baby Busters
Generation X, (often also named the 13thGeneration or Baby Busters/Baby Boomers) was shaped by political experiences such as the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin wall and defined as those born after the baby boom ended (birth dates 1961 to 1981). They are characterised by being the first generation with widespread access to television and shaped by the attention they received from the media. The term was used in a wide range of fields from social sciences to popular culture. It was popularised by the author Douglas Coupland in the novel “Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture” (1991).

The Millenial Generation
The demographic cohort following Generation X is – surprisingly enough – described as Generation Y. It is also called Millennial Generation, Net Generation or Echo Boomers. Many sources have Generation Y spanning from the 1970s (during the late years of the Vietnam war) to the late 1990s, others between 1980 and 2000 (cf. Tim Walters, Ph.D. from Forrester Research). Characteristics of this generation vary, depending on region and social conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use of communication media and digital technologies. Shaped by the events of its time and the rise of communication technologies, it’s members, who have not yet hit 30, are familiar with almost all aspects of the internet, websites like YouTube and social networking sites. This may explain why they are rather peer-oriented due to the easy use of communication through technology. Compared to their elders, they seem to have a very different social behaviour and are often seen as spoiled children who demand good salary conditions and best time to work.

Participation vs. Command-and-Control

When conducting a survey with Swedish youngsters via Internet and Facebook (report entitle e-revolution), PricewaterhouseCoopers found out that collaboration and participation are not just words and that this generation is one of the most innovative. Attitudes and opinions are formed through the net, young people having a clear vision of it’s role. Generation Y strongly influenced the U.S. presidential election in 2008. 71% of those under 30 years went to the polls for the first time and two-thirds voted for Barack Obama. With a “speak your mind” philosophy, they are much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management and don’t fear authorities. Plus, work-life balance is becoming increasingly important.

The Y in Austria
In Austria, Generation Y may be a much smaller cohort due to technical and cultural factors, especially the later introduction of the internet and most other services (in 1999, only 16 % of the Austrian households had access to the net compared to 42 % of the U.S. households in 2000, although there has been a significant increase from 2000 onwards. By the turn of the millennium, statistics showed that the Internet usage in Europe was still lagging considerably behind usage in the USA. Of all people aged 15 years and older, in the U.S. 53 % were online during 14 days, while in Europe only 27 % were online.

The iGeneration
The next Generation, Generation Z (sometimes referred to as Generation M, Internet Generation, iGeneration, Generation Silent or Generation Next), is already knocking on the employment market’s door. Born between the mid-1990s and the end of the 2000s (some sources also name 2004) as the children of Generation X, their members are equally if not more peer-orientated than their elders. They grew up with the internet, multi-tasking and multimedia mobiles. Interactive sources of information and networking are preferred over traditional information channels like press and television. Live without the internet is unimaginable, the whole life being mirrored in online services.

Micorblogging especially for grown-ups?
Generation Z makes use of a variety of social networks and interactive services independently from time and location. Microblogging is popular and messages tend to get shorter. Interestingly enough, people under the age of 25 make up almost a quarter of all U.S. Internet users and yet only 16 percent of Twitter’s audience in June of 2009. Conversely, the large majority of Twitter users (64 %) fell into the 25 to 54 age group. However, with 10 million users, the service is excessively used in the U.S. and the trend is currently shifting – microblogging service is becoming increasingly popular with the younger users in the U.S. with younger age groups flooding in the fastest.
On the average, the youngsters of today’s Generation Z are highly connected, eager to share information with friends and to combine many different services on their common place, the internet. They are sometimes criticised for lacking verbal communication skills. However, this generation is still being born and very young. It is therefore hard to describe all its characteristics without speculating.

• World eDemocracy Forum: Why Generation Y and Z will change politics
• Morgan Stanley Report in the Financial Times (Pdf)
• eRevolution Report – Pricewaterhousecoopers
• Generation X: They’ve arrived at work with a new attitude
• Youngsters online-offline (German)
• Generation M
• Age Group of Generation Z
• Internet use in the U.S. 2000
• Twitter statistics (German)
• Twitter not so popular with the young people
• Young People are tuning to Twitter
• Changing Demographics of Twitter

ePart 2010 will take place 29 August to 2 September in Lausanne (CH). ePart is co-organised with EGOV 2010 conference so a chance to meet colleagues and peers in both fields.

ePart 2010 covers a whole range of research topics within area of eParticipation. The principal aim is to review research advances in both social and technological scientific domains, seeking to demonstrate new concepts, methods and styles of eParticipation.

ePart 2010 will in particular focuses on:

• The research landscape, directions and foundations
• Research methods, method integration and techniques
• Cultural and normative differences in eParticipation
• Comparative analyses of eParticipation practices
• eParticipation projects: design, implementation, evaluation, quality and impact
• Technologies for eParticipation, policy modelling, simulation and visualisation
• Online conversation and deliberation, eConsulation, ePoling, eLegislation, eElectioneering, eVoting, Social networking
• Education, training courses, and curricula

ePart 2010 papers submission – in line with the above focus areas – will be allowed in four distinct types of submissions:

• Completed research papers
• Ongoing research and innovative projects
• Workshops and panels on pertinent issues
• PhD colloquium submission.

ePart is closely aligned with EGOV 2010 - the IFIP eGovernment conference and the EGOV community. Note that this year both conferences will be located for the first time outside the DEXA cluster of conferences. ePart 2010 is sponsored by IFIP, WG8.5.

Important Dates

• Submission of papers: 3 March 2010
• Submission of workshop/panel proposals: 15 March 2010
• Submissions to PhD colloquium: 15 March 2010
• Notification of acceptance for papers: 30 March 2010
• Notification of acceptance for workshops/panels: 30 April 2010

Publication

All accepted completed research papers will be published by Springer LNCS. Ongoing research and innovation projects papers will be published by Trauner Druck. Outstanding research papers from the conference might be selected for further development and publication in a special issue of a relevant journal.

Conference chairs

• Ann Macintosh, The University of Leeds (UK)
• Efthimios Tambouris, University of Macedonia (GR)
• Olivier Glassey, IDHEAP- University of Lausanne (CH)

BY Danish Technological Institute/Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen

Please find further information, templates and the call for papers here.

I hope this helps to finish your papers in time!

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC