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/

To be honest, the argument is not new. Already in the 2006 general election, a survey of electoral flows showed that the citizens embedded in homogeneous partisan networks were comparatively more influenced than those who discussed politics within heterogeneous networks that do not uniformly support a single political position. In both cases, the effects of interpersonal networks on voting behavior turned out to be stronger than those of TV news programs and generalist talk shows.

However, the big difference this time – particularly in the case of the referendum, since the administrative ballots were involving only part of the Italian population, though also including important cities like Milan, Turin, Bologna and Naples – is that almost all nationwide TV channels did not provide any coverage of the election day till the very last week of campaign. Critics attributed this lack of transparency to the fact that 5 out of 7 channels (three private and two public) are controlled by the media tycoon and elected PM Silvio Berlusconi, and that the referendum was putting into question the building blocks of his government’s policy stance: from privatization of a public service like tap water supply to the rebuilding of nuclear power plants in Italy, not to forget the controversial law that had suspended de facto the numerous ongoing trial hearings of the Prime Minister till the end of his mandate.

Knowing that the majority of voters would have repelled these acts – the argument continues – the Government’s unspoken strategy was aimed to prevent the 50,001% quorum (percentage of population going to the polls) that is required to make a referendum’s results effective, according to the Italian Constitution, differently from any normal election. Parts of that strategy were reportedly: the decision taken by the Ministry of Interior to postpone the referendum day till the beginning of school holidays in Italy, the slow start-up of the usual TV video clips instructing citizens how to vote as well as of the electoral talk shows in the national TV channels (a delay that was formally blamed by the National Telecommunication Authority), and other hilarious happenings like TV news speakers making mistakes on the actual election date, or fake weather forecasts announcing the sunshine and inviting people to go off on leisure trips… The same appeal, by the way, which was indirectly made to the electorate by key members of the incumbent majority.

Thus, while the impact of television on voting was being sterilized somehow, Italy registered an explosion of political discussions and particularly word of mouth spreading on social networks, with hundreds of Facebook groups created ad hoc and Twitter messages sent around to promote participation of friends and relatives in the referendum day (the assumption being that once reached the quorum, there would be no doubt on the results; in fact, the “aye’s” to abrogation ultimately won 95-5). Statistics available from Google Insights clearly show how the public’s interest on making web searches on the word “referendum” was steadily growing in the two weeks before. Here again, some humorous peaks were reached: for instance, Madonna’s latest hit being forced to change from “Vogue” to “Vote!“, or the TV information service for the hearing impaired becoming a pretext for mockery of Government censorship on how to vote.

Most of these video clips have relied on YouTube and other similar repositories to support viral distribution to peers and reach the top headlines of printed – as well as Internet – press. Yet, it remains fairly undemonstrated that a decisive push to voters orientation has been a direct consequence of this exposure. For instance, according to an instant poll realized by IPR Marketing on the aftermath of referendum day, 81% of former Berlusconi’s party voters and 64% of “Terzo Polo” (the main center opposition party) did actually stay at home on the referendum day, compared with 10% of left party supporters and a surprising 49% of the Northern League followers (the biggest ally in the Prime Minister’s coalition).

To conclude, while the political effects of social networks seem to have been enhanced by a partisan, purposeful reaction to a Government’s instrumental exploitation of traditional media and particularly TV, real impact seems to have more likely occurred within the center-left opinion area – by the way, the 2006 general election also saw the victory of a leftist majority, and part of the Northern League’s electorate is said to be made of former center-left voters – while the persistent power of television on electoral behavior is not decisively disconfirmed. Further research is needed to assess whether this election round marked a real breakthrough in the Italian politics or is simply another step of the long march towards wider engagement of “ordinary” people in the electronic participation arena.

It’s not surprising that any kind of a project has a set of risks that can impair the project’s results. eParticipation projects can be especially exposed to a number of various risks, ranging from poor platform developments, which don’t meet users’ requirements and preferences, to inadequate communication strategies.

Therefore, developing a risk management plan in the early stage of a project is crucial. It allows to identify certain risks, to analyse them and to develop early strategies and solutions that will help in either minimizing their impact on a project or completely avoiding them.

However, the identification of risks at the beginning of a project is not enough, because additional risks might arise during the duration of the project or the proposed solutions and strategies to overcome them might prove to be ineffective. Thus, a continuous tracking and control of such risks is very much desirable. In this respect, the Continuous Risk Management (CRM) paradigm developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (https://www.sei.cmu.edu/risk) can be a valuable strategy. It doesn’t only allow for continuous risk identification and management, but it also helps in assessing risk exposure by combining the impact and probability of the risk.

Link to video lecture: https://videolectures.net/forum2010_delakorda_meis/
Link to presentation: https://www.inepa.si/images/stories/mapping_edemocracy_see_region_delakorda.pdf.

Lecture presented by Simon Delakorda, M. Sc., executive director, Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA) and member of the Central and Eastern Citizens Network eParticipation expert group.

10 NGOs representatives and activists from Armenia, Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Poland and Romania attended the workshop.

Participants were introduced with E-participation / E-democracy concept, political documents of the Council of Europe relating to eDemocracy, current e-participation developments in Central and Eastern Europe and different e-participation tools as well as good practices. The second part of the workshop facilitated open discussion about opportunities for involving e-participation tools into current and future civil society projects in the region.

The workshop was lead by Mr. Csaba Madarász (e-democracy expert and consultant, Hungary) and Mr. Simon Delakorda, M.Sc. (Institute for Electronic Participation, Slovenia)

Citizens Participation University 2010 was organized by the Civil College Foundation and Central and Eastern European Citizens Network (CEE CN).

Csaba Madarász and Simon Delakorda

Workshop presentations:
1. eParticipation in the CEE: NGO’s perspective (pdf, 4,10 mb).

Citizens Participation University 2010 participants @ CEE CN

Simon Delakorda and Csaba Madarász @ CEE CN

The ultimate goal for all the partners is to create a community of users and debaters in charge of testing online the WAVE platform and its innovating tool: Debategraph. This forum will use ground breaking graphical techniques to enable everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge, to exchange views and debate on complex climate change issues.

The WAVE Project will end in January 2011, after which the European Commission will decide whether this tool is efficient among others and if it should be used more intensively.

Climate change is one of the most challenging and most serious phenomenons which we must face today. Therefore citizens, special interest groups and decision-makers are invited to mobilize and subscribe, free of charge, to the following websites:

French Pilot Site (https://www.debatclimat.eu)
UK Pilot Site (https://www.jointhewave.org)
Lithuanian Pilot Site (https://www.wave-diskusijos.lt)
WAVE EU Site (https://www.wavedebate.eu)

Photo by fRandi-Shooters on Flickr.com

Europas Netzwerk für ePartizipation PEP-NET – Pan European eParticipation Network – lädt am 23. September 2010 in die historische Speicherstadt der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg ein. Im Mittelpunkt der von Richard Wilson, dem Begründer von Involve and izwe, moderierten eintägigen Veranstaltung steht das Thema Online-Bürgerbeteiligung – ePartizipation.

Beleuchtet werden insbesondere die Facetten
– ePartizipation in Europa: strategische Ziele vs. Umsetzung
– Die Zukunft der ePartizipation: regional, national und international
– Vorzeigeprojekte der ePartizipation: Berichte aus dem Praxisfeld

Die internationale Tagung ist für die Bedürfnisse von Vertretern aus Verwaltung, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Bürgerorganisationen konzeptioniert. Gerade in Zeiten knapper Kassen stehen verschiedene Ausprägungen der ePartizipation, wie Bürgerhaushalte, die Beteiligung der Bürger an Gesetzgebungsverfahren, Open Data, Bürgerbeteiligung in der Politikfeldgestaltung, cooperative government und Transparenz bei Kommunen, Ländern und Nationen auf der Agenda. PEP-NET widmet sich der Förderung der ePartizipation und schafft mit der Veranstaltung eine besondere Plattform für einen intensiven Austausch, weiterführende Diskussionen und anregende Gespräche mit hochrangigen Persönlichkeiten.

PEP-NET freut sich besonders, die Teilnahme beitragsfrei anbieten zu können. Eine Anmeldung für die limitierte Veranstaltung ist ab sofort über die Online-Registrierung unter https://pep-net.eu/pep-net-summit/ möglich.

Der offizielle Hashtag für die Veranstaltung ist #PEPSUM

Extended Call  For Papers – eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM)

Special Issue in Collaboration with
PEP-NET: Sustainable eParticipation

Guest Editors

• Rolf Luehrs (PEP-NET, TuTech Innovation GmbH, D)
• Francesco Molinari (SmartIntuitions Ltd., CY)

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government addresses the theory and practice in the areas of eDemocracy and Open Government as well as eGovernment, eParticipation, eDeliberation and eSociety. The aim is to impact the quality, visibility, efficiency and use of research and work in eDemocracy, Open Government and related fields.

Call for Papers

The past decade has seen a significant increase in the number, variety and quality of eParticipation trials, particularly in Western and Southern European countries. The impulse of the European Parliament and the financial support by the Commission have been instrumental in establishing a pan-European community of practice, made up of academia, governments and solution providers from virtually all EU Member States.

However, on the evaluative side, many projects that were seen through to their conclusion apparently failed to meet expectations. The most evident limitations are the typically low number of active participants and the relatively poor impact of the (majority of) projects.

Although it is often taken for granted that ICT-supported political participation will be of increased importance in the future, the question of how to enhance the sustainability of eParticipation projects has not yet been convincingly answered. In times where most of the European countries have to cope with a difficult financial situation, eParticipation supporters and particularly Public Administration officials will be put under even more pressure to show that the required resources lead to tangible results and create real value for the citizens.

In this volume of JEDEM we are calling for theoretical and practical papers addressing the challenges of Sustainable eParticipation.

• review of successful examples of implementation
• institutional, legal, social and economic aspects of sustainable eParticipation
• ICT supported co-creation of public services
• eParticipation and Gov 2.0
• Living Labs and eParticipation

The journal encourages critical, multi-disciplinary approaches including political science, legal studies, economics, sociology and psychology so as to better understand and support societal and institutional needs, developments and changes.

We look forward to your submission in one of the following categories (maximum length 15 pages excluding references):

• Scientific Research Papers (research in progress or completed) – anonymous peer review;
• Case Studies anonymous peer review;
• Project Descriptions (focus on practitioners) – editorial review;
• Part IV: Reflections (Literature reviews, comments, discussions, and interviews) – no review.

Important Dates

• Extended Deadline for submission: 21 July 2010
• Notification of acceptance: 21 August 2010
• Camera-ready paper: 13 September 2010
• JeDEM Issue 3 will be online September 2010

Submission procedure

https://www.jedem.org/about/submissions#authorGuidelines and format template: https://www.jedem.org/public/journals/1/template-0.dot

JeDEM is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

Today, June 15, the reduced early registration fee ends! (300€ including social events)
From June 16 the price will be 360€.

In order to get the discounted fee, register online today!
The 4. International Conference on Electronic Voting will be held from July 21 to 24 of 2010 in Bregenz, Austria. Please have a look at our internationally casted conference programme here.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference in July – so register now!

Daniel Botz – EVOTE2010 Conference Manager

Photo of Robert Krimmer

When Britons went to vote in the General Election on 6^th May, some of them were locked out of the polling booths and were not able to cast their votes. An article on the PublicTechnology website suggested that eVoting could be the answer to this problem, and should be given another chance.

I spoke to Robert Krimmer – Director and Founder of the Competence Center for Electronic Voting in Austria and a founding member of PEP-NET – to find out whether he agreed.

John Heaven: Hi Robert. What is E-Voting.cc, and what do you mean by eVoting?

Robert Krimmer: E-Voting.cc is an Austrian Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that fosters the development of eVoting. We deal with any type of eVoting – whether electronic machines in polling booths, internet voting, voting through cash machines, mobile phone voting. The important thing is that the act of casting a vote is done electronically.

JH: So does that include the punch-card system that is used in the United States?

RK: No, that is not included because the votes are counted electronically but not cast electronically. We use the Council of Europe’s definition of eVoting.

JH: You have heard about the problems that UK voters had last week: there were complaints about voters queuing for hours only to be turned away at 10pm. Could eVoting have solved this problem, as discussed in a recent PublicTechnology article?

RK: No. eVoting cannot solve non-technical problems, but should be seen as part of a wider picture. The UK voting system has a number of specific issues: weak identification because you don’t need to show photo ID to vote; self-registration rather than automatic registration, which can be a problem when people move house and affect data quality; non-anonymous voting (because in theory it is possible to find out who somebody voted for due to a number on their ballot paper).

In some cases, eVoting could have made the problem worse: the problem in the UK was lack of capacity to accommodate the number of people voting; using voting machines can take longer than the old-fashioned system of stuffing a piece of paper into a box.

The UK has lots of issues it needs to discuss about the electoral system generally, for example its attitude to coalition governments, which are accepted in the rest of Europe, and the so-called “fairness” of its voting system. eVoting should be part of that wider discussion because it needs to be part of an electoral system that is seen as fair.

Having said that, the eVoting readiness survey found that the UK would be a good place for eVoting to be introduced precisely because it has high public confidence in its voting sytem. It came first, above places like Switzerland, Russia and Venezuela.

JH: Where does eVoting fit in to eDemocracy?

RK: I see eVoting as just one – very important – part of eDemocracy. The second is eParticipation, which for me is a modern version of the Greek Agora: public deliberation, discussion and afterwards you have it followed by a vote. Without a reliable voting system, the agora is meaningless. If we are to have modern methods of deliberation, people will expect to have modern ways of voting too. Both together will lead to a new form of democracy.

JH: Apart from that, what are the concrete advantages of eVoting?

RK: It is easier for disabled people to vote electronically. You can increase the size of text on the screen on a voting machine, and can even have a system that uses audio to enable blind people to vote. For people with mobility problems, voting on the internet means they don’t have to leave the house. Votes are counted more quickly and accurately. And yes, it is easier to accommodate larger number of voters with internet voting.

JH: I heard that Estonia introduced eVoting in 2005, and the Austrian Students’ Federation conducted the first legally-binding election using eVoting recently. What is important for a successful eVoting exercise?

RK: You have to get the technology right and have the important stakeholders on board. It is crucial for the voters to have confidence in the system. As with any election, you have to get the basics right, such as anonymity.

People need to see eVoting as a welcome addition to the voting system and have confidence and trust in it.

JH: You just spoke about trustworthiness. Isn’t that a big problem with eVoting?

RK: Paper voting is more tangible because you can hold the paper ballot in your hand, and physically demonstrate that the system cannot be tampered with. People are more likely to trust that kind of system. With eVoting, you cannot hold the ballot paper in your hand.

Further, electronic systems are very complex. They use the kind of maths you learn at university, whereas paper-based systems use the maths you learn at high school.

JH: So are people right not to trust eVoting?

RK: As I said earlier, it has to be introduced into a trusted environment and cannot fix a broken voting system. It is important to offer people a choice between electronic and paper voting.

Let me explain the security issue with an analogy: it’s a bit like the risk of getting into a car versus getting into a plane. If something goes wrong with a car, the results are not necessarily disastrous. If something goes wrong with a plane most of the times everybody dies, but this is much less likely than something going wrong with a car because of the care that is taken to avoid errors.

Likewise, it’s easier to manipulate a paper voting system but the consequences are less catastrophic. To hack an online system, you need lots of expertise and insider knowledge, but you are then more able to sabotage the whole election. Whether you use paper based or electronic voting, you will always have these problems.

JH: I recently heard a discussion that raised the issue of the depth of eParticipation. If people can participate much more easily and without thinking, does this devalue eParticipation? Does eVoting make votes worthless?

RK: We should make voting as attractive as possible, and people should be able to use the easiest option for them.

People who travel a lot (like me) may have difficulty voting, but the internet makes it possible. Some people find voting on the internet is very difficult but it is much easier for them to go around the corner to a polling station because they are always at home.

I agree that people need to take voting seriously enough that they are “returning customers” who don’t vote on something once and never take an interest again. Perhaps eVoting shouldn’t be as easy as clicking “Like” on Facebook, but that is an easy problem to solve. For example, you can introduce smart cards that people need to vote.

So in short: no, this is not a problem that we need to worry about.

JH: Finally, what is the future of eVoting. Will there always be doubts about its security, or will it get better?

RK: There will always be problems, but that applies to any voting system. However, we will overcome these issues because we have to: we will need eVoting in the future whether we  like it or not because voting needs to keep up with the rest of eParticipation.

eVoting is the logical next step in the electronic revolution on the way to a modern democracy!

JH: That was a really interesting chat. Many thanks for your time!

RK: You’re welcome. Don’t forget to register for the 4^th International E-Voting Conference from 21^st to 24^th July!