Call for Papers for the 10th European Conference on e-Government ECEG 2010 in Limerick (17-18 June 2010) is now open. Submissions should address applications for e-Government, challenges to e-Government, e-Voting and e-democracy issues as well as the issue of European citizenship. The conference welcomes academic papers, case studies, work in progress as well as non-academic contributions.  Further information …

A detailed report on the last weeks eDemocracy summit – this year BerlinInOctober – is given by Simon Columbus. The un-conference brought together 50 participants from 19 different countries. The updated conference wiki will be available soon.

The winner of the e-Democracy Award 2009 is announced. Congratulations to EU Profiler. Amazing 2,5 millions citizens have used the tool during last European elections to compare their opinions with those of some 300 European political parties. 

Another important award will be announced soon, but before members of the ePractice.eu community are invited to vote for their three favourite cases for The European eGovernment Award among the 52 finalists. Online voting closes at 11th of November.

Worth to mention – and probably the most successful key note at the IR 9.0 was Stephen Grahams speech on “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space”. He basically works on the relations between urban places and mobility, infrastructure and technology on the one hand, and war, surveillance and geopolitics on the other. In his recent work – and in his talk – he describes the implications of new media technologies for urban life and the proliferation of urban surveillance systems which are increasingly automated through computer software. His latest book on this topic will be out in March 2009 under the title “Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism”. It will be definitely worth reading it even if it will be a pretty frightening reading.

Interestingly most of the presented research on the conference followed a qualitative approach. Thus it was much more about giving a close description of areas like e-science, online games, religion online than providing statistical data on Internet usage, which I appreciate. Unfortunately the track on e-participation was a little bit disappointing.

But I was able to meet Thomas Hammer-Jakobsen, head of the Copenhagen Living Lab. Located close to the IT University the Copenhagen Living Lab tries to find answers how public administrations but also enterprises could meet the challenges of a changing society in terms of technological revolution and demographical changes through user driven innovations. I was very impressed how serious the Living Lab approach are taken by Thomas Hammer-Jakobsen and colleagues. They are really working on the concept of user driven innovations out of the daily users life by e.g. running a whole retirement community as a living lab. Currently they experiment with the development and the deployment of an online platform to support the process of user driven innovation on a variety of topics.

As mentioned earlier by Francesco here the combination of e-participation with the Living Lab approach might be a valuable idea. In particular, a potential benefit could be a careful preparation of the participatory trials by analysing the users needs to avoid – as Francesco stressed out – “the most common pitfalls of current eDemocracy experiences, such as: lack of active involvement from citizens and/or stakeholders, mistrust from the people, skepticism from the politicians, and ultimately a low reusability of upcoming results within the public decision making process.”

Lets hope that neither the promising area of e-participation nor the field of Living Lab research will suffering too badly from the current financial crisis.

The two days started with interesting keynotes. On Monday, Ann Macintosh, head of the department for digital governance, University of Leeds, emphasized at her presentation that most of the current eparticipation projects pretend to do deliberation but most of them fall short of several important aspects. Her key argument was that deliberation should not only allow citizens to express their view, but also to get an impression on the others’ opinion, as well as the opportunity to form an own, to dissent from the others’ perspective and to change it. As one can easily imagine, Ann Macintosh initiated a lively discussion and her presentation escorted the whole afternoon session with reports on several projects.

Tuesday, Steven Clift suggested at his keynote to integrate the concept of “place” into the Internet. While the Internet is usually seen as a global medium, independent from space and time, it could gain a new quality if information could be combined with place, like e.g. for the organization of local community neighbourhood. Joining this plenary session, Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute) and David Newman (Queens University Management School Belfast) also had interesting talks. Thanks to the perfect organisation by the Centre of E-Government of Danube University Krems, all this keynotes will be hopefully online soon.