– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
The Hong Kong City University, the Danube University Krems and the University of Michigan jointly organise CeDEM-Asia-2014 with the following tracks:

SOCIAL MEDIA AND CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
– Social media, citizen mobilization & engagement
– Sustainability of e-participation
– Social movements and citizen networks
– Online campaigning and elections

E-GOVERNMENT AND OPEN GOVERNMENT
– ICTs and their use for governmental transformation
– Open data, transparency, participation and collaboration in government
– Cultures of governance, access and openness, crowdsourcing for government
– Roles of policy-makers, industry professionals, and civil society activists in facilitating open governance
– Electronic identity
– Cross-border interoperability of e-government artefacts approaches and standards

DIGITAL RIGHTS AND INTERNET FREEDOM
– Internet governance
– Internet freedom and censorship
– Surveillance, privacy, and cyber-security
– Digital divide and literacy

FUTURE AND EMERGING TOPICS
– Smart cities, citizen science and urban informatics
– Internet of things and government transformation
– Social media-enabled crisis and disaster management
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
* Research papers, case studies and policy papers: 12 pages, double blind peer review
* Reflection papers, work in progress and ongoing research papers: 6 pages
* Workshop proposals: 2 pages

All accepted papers will be published in conference proceedings. Best papers will be published with the OA eJournal of E-Democracy and Open Government : www.jedem.org
DATES & LOCATION
* Submission Deadline: 15 July 2014
* Conference: 4-5 December, 2014
* Location: City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.

LINKS
* Conference Website: www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem-asia-14
* Call for Papers (PDF): https://tinyurl.com/cfp-cedem-asia-14
* Call for Reviewers: https://tinyurl.com/reviewers-cedem-asia-14

We kindly ask you to share this CFP with you colleagues and friends. We are looking forward to seeing you in Hong Kong.

On behalf of the Conference Chairs,
.Marko M. Skoric (Hong Kong City University, Hong Kong S.A.R)
.Nojin Kwak (University of Michigan, USA)
.Peter Parycek (Danube University Krems, Austria)

We have pulled together a small overview about relevant research conferences for 2013. For further, detailed information about the below mentioned conferences please browse the link under each paragraph (e.g. conference fee, registration). The overview below is not complete, hence if you do find another conference worth to mention, please add a comment and a link, if available.

Youth 2.0: Connecting, Sharing and Empowering? Affordances, Uses and Risks of Social Media

March, 20-22 | Antwerp, Belgium | Working language: English

The call for papers ended end of November last year, thus, the final program is in process.

The conference focuses on the themes of identity construction, social relations, interests at stake, supporting and empowering.

Within the strand of interest at stake, the question is included, how young people can be mobilized through social media. The concrete design of this thematic strand will be answered once the final program is published. In particular to what extant eParticipation is addressed concretely.

Further information: https://www.ucsia.org/main.aspx?c=*UCSIAENG2&n=108874&ct=108874

Youth and Civic Participation. Is a Younger Generation Reshaping European Politics?

May, 15-17 | Antwerp, Belgium | Working language: English

The UCSIA devotes a whole conference to the topic of youth and digital participation. The call for papers has ended end of January. Overall, the conference addresses four key themes: Motives and values that inspire youth to engage, Old and new behaviour of civic participation, Context and skills that condition youth civic participation, Impact and influence of youth civic participation on contemporary politics.

Further information: https://www.ucsia.org/main.aspx?c=*UCSIAENG2&n=110394

Cedem – International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2013

May, 21-23 | Krems, Austria | Working language: English

Till February 5^th interested ones in this conference could use the chance to submit a paper or a workshop proposal within the call for papers.

The conference offers a great variety of thematic tracks related to current questions: E-Democracy and E-Participation, Open Collaborative Government,

E-Policies and E-Society – Human Rights for the Internet Age, Social and Mobile Media for Public Administration, E-Campaigning & E-Politics,

Bottom-Up Movements, Open Data, Transparency and Open Innovation, Open Science and Open Access, Freedom and Ethics in Digital Societies.

In what extant eParticipation and youth will be addressed, the final program will show, once it is published.

Further informationen: https://www.donau-uni.ac.at/en/department/gpa/telematik/edemocracy-conference/edem/vid/18671/index.php?URL=%2Fen%2Fdepartment%2Fgpa%2Ftelematik%2Fedemocracy-conference%2F18671

12th Nordic Youth Research Symposium (NYRIS) – Changing societies and cultures: Youth in the digital age

June, 12-14 | Tallinn, Estonia | Working language: English

The call for papers ended these days on January 31^st, thus, the next step towards the final program is in progress. The conference addresses in general the challenges of the digital change from a youth perspective. Overall, the organisers offer 30 sessions in 16 streams, displaying a large variety of topics such as, youth participation and political activities, online youth activism, youth and digital games, youth and online identities, as well as youth and media.

Further information: https://www.tlu.ee/?LangID=2&CatID=5995

12. eGOV & 4.ePART

September, 16-19 | Koblenz, Germany | Working language: English

Within the 12^th eGOV conference, the 4^th edition of ePART takes place as an own thematic track. The deadline for contributions, such as papers, is March 15. For workshop proposals and panels counts a different deadline for which it is advisable to browse the conference website regularly, to be up to date about it.

In 2012 some new relevant insights about eParticipation and youth could be presented, let’s see for 2013 edition.

Further information: https://www.epart-conference.org  

Some further inspiration can be found in the blog post from Tim Bonnemann (@planspark) from Intellitics, providing additional information on conferences in Northern America, for example.

Within the project, youthpart will be able to pile up some insights regarding relevant questions about youth & e-participation and young people’s participation in the digital society. These findings but also technical innovations may be interesting for a forum such as ePART as well.
Among the 18 research presentations, 2 key notes and 2 workshops, the following four projects attracted youthpart’s attention:

• Getting Teenagers to participate: a case study from the city of Lausanne
• Choosing the Right Medium for Municipal eParticipation
• Online Communities Support Policy-Making: The need for Data Analysis
• Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media

Getting Teenagers to participate: a case study from the city of Lausanne

Getting Teenager to participate – that was the focus of the scientific analysis presented by a representative of the University of Lausanne. The task proofed to be challenging: the city of Lausanne decided to establish a youth council and in order to attract applications for it, the decision was made for a two folded campaign, using online (e.g. facebook, youtube) and offline media (e.g. posters). For the design and implementation a media agency was contracted. The (failed) campaign was evaluated by the University of Lausanne and the Graduate School of Public Administration and showed how difficult it is in fact to motivate young people to participate in political engagement beyond organized structures. Yet, some interesting findings from the motivated youngster who handed in an application suggest that various factors contribute to becoming active as a young person, such as idealism to improve the world, political discussions with parents or active members of the family who serve as example, previous (voluntary) experiences.

Choosing the Right Medium for Municipal eParticipation

Researchers from the University of Agder put the relationship between media preferences, the need for information and local participation in the centre of their research. They chose an 8,000 inhabitant village and first identified the different target groups (e.g. business, youth, immigrants, seniors) and asked them about their media preferences and information need.  According to the data, young people voice a need for general information, local information, individual information, and in addition are interested in a service dialogue as well as a service to report infrastructure problems. For all these information needs, the figures show that internet based communication services are in the lead, especially websites and email. Social media services unfold their strengths when it comes to the specific information need “forum for discussion” and “dialog among business” whereas mobile media peak when it comes to reporting infrastructure problems.

Online Communities Support Policy-Making: The need for Data Analysis

Using swarm intelligence to support policy making still has its perils when it comes to text-based online discussions: finding the key arguments and their benchmark within a reasonable time span proofs to be difficult. There is a need for data analysis based on a technical approach says a representative of the Fraunhofer Institute. The software presented manages to analyse long thematic threads according to different criteria: words are clustered based on their frequency and the user just needs to define the name of that specific cluster then. Additionally, the tendency of clustered text can be displayed which allows to identify positive and negative arguments and their strength. One important aspect is the setting of the discussion meaning that users know about the purpose of the online-platform, the topic, relevant questions and who set it up; that only allows users to make conscious contributions.

Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media

The presentation of a European research project lead to some controversial discussion among the audience: the consortium presented the idea to develop crawler software that searches social media, collect postings, analyse them and offer them to support policy making. The consortium calls it non-moderated crowdsourcing in social media, while the audience is reminded about surveillance mechanisms. Representatives of the project argue that social media are public sources of information, similar to online newspapers, and therefore could be used easily for policy making purposes. A listener from the audience refers to ministries who use exactly the same argument to watch online activities of their citizens, for surveillance purposes. The discussion showed that this project works at the brim of the notion of e-participation.

ePART and EGOV conferences benefit from their international audience; not only through the contribution of European participants, but to a great extant through participants from around the globe, such as Mexico, Indonesia, the United States of America, Brasilia, Cameroon, India and South Korea. ePART’s fifth edition will take place from September 16-19, 2013 in Koblenz, Germany, jointly with the 12^th EGOV conference.

For more information about the conferences browse https://www.epart-conference.org/

The invisible man

Today we held the second of two Google+ Hangouts with PEP-NET members. No real agenda, open to anyone who was interested, and not quite sure whether it would work. We gave it a go.

From an organiser’s point of view, the best things about doing a hangout rather than a text-based live chat (as we have done before with CoverItLive) is that i) the number of participants doesn’t need to be high for you to feel successful and ii) you can really see who is there and know that people were there for the duration. If I had organised a live text chat and six people in total had taken part, I would have been pretty disappointed.

Rather than writing boring minutes of the conversation, here is a collection of links to projects that were mentioned, as well as the websites or twitter accounts of the participants themselves. After all, it’s the taking part that counts, not the minutes.

Finland: Youth Initiative Channel, a project allowing youngsters to make suggestions/express wishes. Similar to FixMyStreet but about solutions, not problems.
(Some information in 2.3.1. of this report (PDF)), via @nadinekarbach.

Iceland: A group of citizens drafted a new constitution using online collaboration tools and presented it to the speaker of the parliament. Here’s a link that I found about the story, via @nadinekarbach (again)

Finland: The Finnish children’s parliament, via @nadinekarbach. (Now I feel like a kid copying someone else’s homework. Thanks Nadine.)

UK: 38 Degrees: a platform that brings people together to campaign, via @andywilliamson

The Danish Parliament puts videos of all its sessions online, and has made them fully searchable by users. Here’s an article I found about that. Thanks again, @andywilliamson

Participants:
Gábor Mihucz (Foundation for Societal Participation, Germany/Hungary), @GaborMihucz
Nadine Karbach (YouthPart, Germany), @nadinekarbach
Andy Williamson (FutureDigital, UK/worldwide), @Andy_Williamson
Hans Hagedorn (DEMOS eParticipation, Germany), @haans_en
Rolf Lührs (TuTech/DEMOS eParticipation, Germany), @somed
Peter Sonntagbauer (FUPOL), fupol.eu
… and of course me, @johnheaven
And PEP-NET is @pepnet.

So if you are interested, fill in this Doodle poll to let me know when you can take part and I’ll publicise the date and time when it’s been decided. I’m hoping to keep it simple, with a quick round-robin of introductions and updates on what people are doing, and then discussion about conferences that people are planning to go to (hopefully people will be able to take the opportunity to meet up with one another in person), and then general chatter about recent developments and co-operations.

Looking forward to chatting!

Get involved in the latest developments of  eParticipation tools!

Policy analysts, decision makers as well as civil society stakeholders and other people interested in policy-making all have to cope with numerous arguments brought forward in policy debates. The EU-sponsored IMPACT project develops open source online tools that help to make sense of the range of opinions about public policies expressed in policy consultations.

In a series of webinars, four new prototype tools will be presented, followed by an evaluation of the tools in which participants can discuss further improvements and the potential impact of the tools on policy-making. Based on material from the EU’s consultation on the Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, the participants will learn how to formalise and visualise arguments, how to estimate the effects of policy proposals with the help of policy modelling, and how opinions about arguments are assessed with the help of structured consultations.

We invite all PEP-NET members and readers of this blog to participate!
Please register for one of the following dates on this website:
https://policy-argumentation.posterous.com/webinar-new-online-tools-to-support-argumenta

The following dates are available:

Webinar with focus on argument reconstruction & visualization:

• 21 August 2012, 11:00–12:00 CEST (Tuesday morning)
• 23 August 2012, 16:00–17:00 CEST (Thursday afternoon)

Webinar with focus on policy modelling & structured consultation:

• 28 August 2012, 16:00–17:00 CEST  (Tuesday afternoon)
• 29 August 2012, 11:00–12:00 CEST  (Wednesday morning)

Further information is available here. If you have any questions, please contact Steffen Albrecht: impact@zebralog.de

Hamburg has a growing network of eParticipation experts/enthusiasts, a community that has been given new life by Government 2.0 Netzwerk‘s efforts to revitalise it by organising regular information meetings (Stammtische), one of which was held here at TuTech. So the idea behind the Summit was to feed this community with new ideas from outside Germany, but also to show the outside world what Hamburg has to offer.

In terms of learning from new ideas, we heard from Nick Booth about social media surgeries and his theory of Zero Expectations; Peter Verhaeghe’s ideas about the role of an architect as a mediator between citizens and politics; Erik Tissingh’s presentation of 3D citizen participation tools. Then there were the informal presentations in the break with presenters from Germany, the UK, Austria, Italy and Denmark.

And on the second point: Hamburg’s campaign for a local transparency law is unlike anything elsewhere in Europe. As far as I can see, it is the only high-profile open data campaign of its type. And with Twitter comments like this —  “Everyone doing participation should have @nexthamburg‘s principles above their desk” — no-one can deny that Hamburg has a lot to say about participation.

Judging by the feedback, we managed to do what we set out to. To organise such an event wouldn’t have been possible without PEP-NET: the contacts, the brand, the publicity tools such as the mailing list and the blog. We got in touch with Peter Verhaeghe thanks to a suggestion from Dieter van de Putte, of PEP-NET member De Wakkere Burger. So with a bit of creativity and quite a bit of work, we made the most of PEP-NET and everyone’s a winner. We had a blast!

For more information about what was discussed, have a look at the full report by Noella Edelmann from the Centre of E-Governance at the Danube University.

As well as the regular panels, there is a chance to get up close and personal during the informal presentations that will take part during the lunch break.

We are looking forward to welcoming over sixty participants from across Europe. If you want to be one of them, you had better be quick! Here is the agenda: www.amiando.com/pep-net

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #pepsum.

Photo of Arzun Kolcu

Arzun will be chairing a discussion on architecture and transparency at the PEP-NET Summit on 14th May 2012. For details, including registration, see amiando.com/pep-net.