So we’ve been feeling a little bit innovative for the past week too. After all, we worked closely with Schleswig-Holstein, giving technical support, training and telephone assistance to the wide range of stakeholders who will be working with DEMOS-Plan.

DEMOS-Plan is an online tool that closely follows the procedure laid down by German law for conducting consultations on a particular type of spatial plan (the “Bebauungsplan”). It allows statutory stakeholders to manage submissions internally by requiring one representative to sign off the submissions from different departments. These submissions can be linked to a particular paragraph of the planning document and/or the participant can draw on a map of the plan.

It’s great for the planning authority, because it saves them the trouble of sending paper copies of plans and collating all the submissions manually: instead, this is done automatically.

We think there are other countries in Europe where DEMOS-Plan could be useful and have been investigating this through the Parterre project. If you were at the PEP-NET Summit, you may have caught Francesco Molinari’s presentation of Parterre. (Hopefully you will also have noticed that the Summit was sponsored by Parterre!)

There will be more news on Parterre soon, so keep your eyes on the blog!

* Bauleitplanung Online-Beteiligung Schleswig Holstein

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

PEP-NET lädt Sie zum Live-Chat mit den Herausgebern Renate Mitterhuber, stellvertretende CIO der Hamburger Verwaltung, und Alexander Koop von der Bertelsmann Stiftung am Montag, den 14. Juni 2010 von 16 bis 17 Uhr auf www.pep-net.eu ein. Über www.pep-net.eu gelangen Sie in das Forum und können dort Ihre Fragen rund um das Thema ePartizipation stellen.

Bürgerhaushalt, Leitbildentwicklung und die Stadt- und Bauleitplanung: in diesen Themengebieten werden vermehrt Beteiligungsverfahren über das Internet durchgeführt. Für politische Mandatsträger, Entscheidungsträger und Mitarbeiter öffentlicher Verwaltungen, insbesondere im Bereich E-Government und IT, stellen die im Leitfaden beschriebenen Handlungsempfehlungen eine wertvolle Beratung dar.

Das Dokument „Leitfaden Online-Konsultation“ wurde von der Bertelsmann Stiftung gemeinsam mit dem Deutschen Städte- und Gemeindebund (DStGB), der Finanzbehörde der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg und dem Bundesministerium des Innern erstellt. Der Leitfaden steht als pdf (~1 MB) zum Download für Sie bereit.

Die Diskussion findet in deutscher Sprache statt.

In particular, engagement between policy makers and citizens will be mediated via tools that will:

• make it possible to detect, track and mine opinions and discussions on policy oriented topics.
• will allow discussions to be seeded and stimulated through injection of policy discussion points into relevant communities in a secure and managed way.
• will allow the origins and evolution of opinions to be tracked to provide auditable records of provenance, guard against misuse, and ensure trust and privacy for all involved.

Our target audience includes:

• MPs and IT staff from Parliaments,
• Citizens and other stakeholders, such as networks, regional bodies,
• NGOs,
• Businesses,
• International organizations,
• and the media.

Quantity matters – especially for everything related to the Internet. Just think of the exploding internet penetration rates throughout the recent decades, dizzying stock prices during the new economy or the number of weblogs counted by Technorati.

Since the term web 2.0 has been coined we are flooded by incredibly huge numbers of social network users everyday and only since Obama has managed to mobilise millions of people via the Internet public administrations and politicians seem to consider the participatory potential of the Internet seriously.

However, the flipside of the obsession with scale is that not enough attention is paid to the quality of citizen participation on the Internet. Is a project or service really valuable just because tenth or even hundreds of thousands of users were using it? What does the sheer fact that lots of people wrote to their MP via the Internet or participated in a online petition tells about the contribution of this service to the improvement of political culture or decisions? Or the other way round: Is a political discussion of a certain subject irrelevant just because just a few hundred people participated?

I believe that counting heads or contributions is not a sufficient measure to evaluate what eParticipation can do for Democracy. Even worse, to only stare at numbers obstructs the view to the core strengths of eParticipation like providing a space to express and shape opinions, to exchange arguments, to collaboratively work or create and being heard by political and administrative decision makers.

Still, quantity matters, but for different types of eParticipation to an entirely different extend. If we look ad crowd sourcing-like projects in the political realm it is reasonable to assume that the more citizens participate the better the results will be. If e.g. a public administration wants to learn more about the actual quality and state of streets, buildings and places it would help a lot if as many participants as possible send their comments, photos or videos. But if the same PA asked citizens for proposals on how to more efficiently spend tax payer’s money, the quality of these proposal counts in the first place.

It has been demonstrated quite a few times that deliberative Internet discussions can lead to concrete results, that these results were amplified by traditional media and finally led to better policies. Some of these cases have been introduced here on PEP-NET (1, 2, 3) and none of them managed to attract huge numbers of active participants.

Rather than trying to realise sort of mass-deliberation on particular policies we should try to increase the number of eParticipatory opportunities. A model for this could be the so-called “Long Tail” describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. Chris Anderson showed that products which are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current blockbusters. Transferred to the eParticipation domain this would offer the opportunity to achieve high overall participation rates while keeping up a good deliberative quality in the particular projects.

However, there are lots of different concepts of what participatory budgeting exactly means and even more ways to put these concepts into practice. The main differences are the following:

Approach
While participatory budgeting was originally designed as an instrument of direct democracy with a binding decision of the citizenry, most of the European PBs are implemented as consultations: The citizens were given opportunity to have their say but it is up to the elected representatives to finally decide about the proposals.

Scope
In many cases only selected parts of the public budget are under consideration in others the entire budget is subject to citizen participation. Interestingly the scope seems to depend on the chosen approach: When the entire budget is under consideration, the opinions and preferences of the citizens usually are not binding.

Instruments & Channels
Some of the participatory budgeting projects are still implemented using only traditional communication channels. In most cases the Internet is leastwise used to spread information. Quiet a lot of municipalities or cities are providing interactive channels on the Internet to support the offline activities. And in a few cases the Internet is the only channel for the citizens to participate.

In the following I will focus on the cases where citizens have been provided with an interactive website allowing them to express their views and priorities online.

Click on the map for further information

Berlin-Lichtenberg

The first to mention is a borough (Bezirk) of the city of Berlin called Lichtenberg. The borough counts more than 250.000 inhabitants.

Since 2006, when the first participatory budgeting process has been realised, Lichtenberg invites the citizens each year to discuss the spending tax payers money. Lichtenberg has developed a complete participatory approach, comprising an Internet platform, involvement by writing letters and 13 district assemblies.

The citizens are asked to prioritise the different proposals and a list with the top rated proposals is subject to a representative survey. Finally the borough’s central assembly of representatives decides which of the proposals will be realised and which not. All decisions in favour or against the budget proposals are justified in writing.

In 2008 almost 2500 citizens registered to participate in the Internet, 1800 of which were eligible to vote. However only 218 citizens participated in the final voting. Round about 600 people attended in one the 13 district assemblies.

Concrete examples of realised outcomes of the participatory budgeting process are:

–    The school for continuing education got an elevator and is handicapped accessible.
–    21 trees have been planted in several streets of Lichtenberg in spring 2008.
–    The coordinator for participation of children and adolescents has been appointed on January 1st 2008.
–    Books and DVDs in Vietnamese can now be borrowed from the Anna-Seghers-Library in Lindencenter

Hamburg

The second case to mention is the city of Hamburg’s participatory budgeting, which has been realised twice in 2006 and 2009. In 2006 the Internet was the exclusive participation channel and in 2009 it has been complemented by paper and pencil interviews of pupils and elderly people.

There are a few things which makes the situation in Hamburg quite different to that in Lichtenberg. Hamburg has round about 1.7 million inhabitants and as a city state has its own parliament and is one of the 16 federal states (Bundeslaender) in Germany.

With regard to the participatory budgeting project this is considered both, a chance and a challenge. Compared to those from middle sized municipalities or boroughs Hamburg’s budget is not only much bigger but also much more complex. Nevertheless Hamburg decided to discuss about the entire budget and not only about selected parts.

The focus point of the 2006 ePB, which has been initiated by the parliament, was the City’s difficult financial situation: With more than 10 billion Euros debts, Hamburg had to pay about one billion Euros interests each year. Hence, the main question was how the city could reduce the debts.

To display the city’s expenditures a budget planer has been introduced, which split the overall budget into various policy domains like family policy, interior, the environment etc. The planer enabled all participants to design their own budget by reducing or increasing the individual positions with a budget slider. The only limitation was that the overall budget should not exceed the numbers of 2005. As a result additional spending in one domain had to be compensated by decreasing spending in other.

It turned out that the almost 3000 participants who registered for the ePB reduced the expenditures in all domains but child care, education and science. Additionally to the budget planer the participants could also take part in a moderated online discussion (DEMOS) and collaboratively develop proposals on how to better use the city’s budget. 35 five comprehensive concepts have been generated during the 4 weeks lasting discussion.

The results have been forwarded to Hamburg’s parliament and were discussed in the plenary. Finally three proposals have been selected for implementation. However, the fact that the reasons for this selection have not been published provoked criticism. During the second ePB in 2009 some of the local media questioned the value of the participatory budgeting because of the comparatively few political consequences of the first one. This might be one reason why the number of participants decreased to only 600.

Cologne

While Hamburg’s participatory budgeting relied on word of mouth and media coverage to get known, the city of Cologne informed all citizens in writing when they started with ePB in 2007. The forth largest city in Germany with almost one million inhabitants selected three policy domains to be discussed with a total budget of 311 million Euros, namely “highways/byways/public spaces”, “green spaces” and “sport”.

The consultation process was based on a multi-channel communication strategy comprising  an eParticipation platform, telephone lines (call centre), letter and personal contact.

Interestingly the majority of the ca. 11000 citizens who participated used the Internet: 85% of the almost 5000 suggestions and proposals have been submitted during the four-week online discussion from 22.10 to 19.11.2007. 9% of the suggestions have been submitted by traditional mail, 4% via telephone and 2% via E-Mail.

Cologne’s city council has decided to implement the best 300 ideas, for which it has approved additional resources  of €8.2m for 2008/2009. The citizens’ budget 2010 is about to start in November 2009 and it is planned to include additional areas like education/training and protection of the environment.

Cologne’s citizens’ budget has won several awards, among them the United Nations Public Service Award. It is also one of the nominees for the public prize of the 4th European eGovernment Awards. The voting for this prize is open until November 11th – see here how it works.

Freiburg

The fourth case I would like to introduce is the ePB of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau, a city located in the south-west of Germany. Round about 200.000 citizens are currently living in Freiburg.  Like Hamburg Freiburg used the DEMOS approach combined with the budget planner to conduct a participatory budgeting trial from 7 April to 9 May 2008.

Additionally, a representative survey has been conducted and the citizens have been invited to a city hall conference.
The goals were to engage members of the public in participating in planning the city’s budget for 2009/10 and to generate ideas and knowledge for savings and efficient spending. In addition, the aspect of gender budgeting was introduced to address gender-specific issues connected to the city’s budget.

Citizens registering for the online platform and participating actively in the online discourse and the budget planner numbered 1861. Participants wrote 757 articles in the discussion forums, created 1291 individual budgets for Freiburg and complied 22 wikis discussing specific issues to be addressed by Freiburg’s public administration.

The quantitative results produced by the budget planner had two very promising traits. Firstly there were no radical changes to the budgets even though the participants had the possibility to change every budget in a range from -100% to +100%. The strongest budget change was -23%. This means that the collective results of such a process were very reasonable. Secondly the results of the online budget planner were very similar to those produced by the representative survey mentioned earlier.
Most of the participants of both, the ePB and the survey wished that spending increases should mainly be directed at schools, education, and social programs. According to an unpublished report of the Canadian consultancy nGernera, “the government was very open to heeding to these demands. In one instance, 400,000 Euros were reallocated for spending on child care projects, due in large part to their widespread support throughout the consultations.21 Upon its completion, the Citizen’s Budget had a “huge influence” on the writing of the actual municipal budget”.

Leipzig

Finally the participatory budgeting project of the city of Leipzig will be introduced. Leipzig is located in the east of Germany and counts almost half a million inhabitants. Different from all other cases the ePB in Leipzig has neither been initiated by the government nor the parliament but by the local Agenda21 group. The group asked the citizens to come up with budget related proposals and provided an online budget planner displaying the actual amount of spending in the different domains. Furthermore the administration provided the opportunity to formally object to the budget plan online. However, the respond rate was rather low. In 2008 only 40 citizens participated in the consultation process and only 14 citizens objected against individual parts of the budget plan. One reason for this low participation rate can be seen in a lack of marketing measures to make the citizens aware of the participatory budgeting.

Conclusions
The current experiments with Internet supported participatory budgeting in Germany  led to quite different results. As some cases showed, there is a huge potential to successfully involve the citizenry in the budget planning process. To be successful, (e) participatory budgeting should be implemented on a regular basis and the citizens have to be informed about the opportunity to become involved. Further to this the decision making process and the chances for citizens to influence the budget planning should be pointed in a clear and transparent way.

Further information:

(1) Click on the map

(2) Comprehensive information on  participatory budgeting in Germany is available at www.buergerhaushalt.org

(3) Case description on epractice.eu: Freiburg, Cologne

(4) For international trends I recommend the partcipatory budgeting group on facebook

Disclaimer:

The company I work for, TuTech Innovation GmbH, was responsible for the development of the Internet platforms and the moderation  in Hamburg and Freiburg.

OIDP is open to all cities of the world, public administrations, organizations and research centers who try to know, compare e realize participative democracy’s experiences in local contexts.

The Conference will take place at the International Center for the Childhood “Loris Malaguzzi, in Reggio Emilia. It will be organized to analyze and foster the democratic participation of young people in local contexts. Another purpose is to innovate local governance’s policies promoting a bigger participation of social categories less represented in politic and institutions.

Italian and international best practices concerning political participation of young people will be presented at the conference. Debates and discussions in program will be dedicated to: youth policies and local governance’s systems; pedagocical methods and places for educational experiences; social policies and participation’s places for new generations.

More info (in italian) on: www.oidp.comune.re.it

I think we agree with them from our job

The week, which is a great initiative, just like the previously promoted OneWebDay, which has been celebrated among PepNet members.

This initiative is if we can say, more complex.

When we think about our job, our political or either personal perspective, the roles we play in this arena, might have some extra power to get from the community. From those, who are living in the neighbourhood, who are our chat-forum partners, or even just the old grandmother of our friend.

We can help. We can support the community where we belong to – anytime. Mozilla Service Week is an initiative to put focus on this issue for a week, and go and reach out for anybody around us.

I do hope, that this kind of civil activisim is suitable for all of us – and will make us to subsribe and offer voluntary activities individually.

For me the questions is also somewhere a bit below. Can we, or shall we as Pep-net do something for the larger community of citizens in an organized way during this week?

Download the badges, information here:

https://serviceweek.mozilla.org/promote/mozservice09/en_US

You can check some stories here:

https://serviceweek.mozilla.org/activity/stories/en_US

by Csaba

Participation Camp, Change the Rules, in New York on June 27,28th, will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference wide web participation game called Nomic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic), or roll up their sleeves in a hands on workshop. For preliminary details see: https://www.participationcamp.org

If you might be interested in collaborating with us, please check out our wiki at: https://barcamp.pbworks.com/ParticipationCamp#view=page

What Makes “Change The Rules” Different?

Virtual/Physical Hybrid Structure: One particular feature of this event is that we will be bridging the physical and virtual worlds. We will be opening up virtual spaces in advance of the actual session so as to engage virtual participants in the project. We will also have a room where virtual presenters can connect with those at the conference.

Open Space/Defined Hybrid Structure: We will be using Open Space principles for the creation of some of the sessions, but will also be seeking out the involvement of those that would like to actively engage participants on a specific topic. If there is an issue or a question that you would like to discuss at this event, please let us know!

Play Game: We will be playing the game, Nomic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic). This is a game that is designed to teach participants, by virtue of their experience, some of the interesting features of governance, democracy, rule making, rule following, collaboration etc.

Pre-Session Dialogue: We have opened a SkypeChat space that enable those that are interested in the PCamp theme(s) to connect with each other, exchange ideas, plan potential sessions etc. (already opened)

Sustain Dialogue: Due to the fact that virtual environments are accessible from anywhere, it becomes possible for participants to continue their conversations with others after the conclusion of the session. This makes it possible for them to continue to explore the ideas and projects that they are interested in, as well as to cultivate the relationships with those that they have connected with. We hate the fact that what happens when events end is that there is little or no follow up!

Questions/Themes

Here are a few questions that we have been thinking about. Are there any such questions that are of interest to you, and around which you might be interested in organizing a virtual session?

What, generally speaking, is the role that technology can play in fostering citizen engagement?

What are the best tools for creating the right frameworks for fostering citizen engagement?
What are the particular challenges of using open, collaborative, platforms?

What sorts of business models are consistent with ‘open collaboration’? How can organizations that subscribe to these principles also generate revenue?
How do we utilize technology to mobilize the youth vote?

Process

On June 20th, we created a chat space/conversation in Skype to which we invited all those that had expressed interested in participating in an open dialogue on issues relating to open governance. This chat space allow you the opportunity to:

* Introduce yourself and your project to others that are like minded
* Connect with others that might be interested in your project or might have interesting project ideas.
* Learn, via participation, about how open, collaborative, patterns of interaction work
* Learn, via participation, how groups self organize

Not yet? It has been started by Dan McQuillan, an e-campaignin expert, previously working for Amnesty International, and with background in partialphysics on the topic of web-participation-development and social innovations. After the succesful camp in the UK, the Sicamp nano-Barcamp styled hybrid of development event is buzzing Scotland and the CEE region now.

What is Dan saying about this? 

We hope Social Innovation Camp shows that if you have a little faith in people, they can do amazing things for all sorts of different reasons – whether it’s to solve a problem; to do something that’s worth doing or because it’s simply really good fun.

We believe the incredible thing about the web and new technologies is that they make all of this possible by helping people to organise things better for themselves. And Social Innovation Camp is all about making that a practical reality by helping people create the next generation of social start-ups.

But our really grand vision is that the Social Innovation Camp might play a small part in creating a big change: a shift where people don’t just complain about stuff that needs fixing or rely on government/companies/charities to do it for them. Instead, we want to give people the confidence, connections and skills they need to start up their own thing and mend something that’s broken.

The focus now on the CEE region, with the help of the CEE Trust. The Social Innovation Camp (SIC), will be a part of the Civil Society Forum in Bratislava in September’09, which is bringing together talented software developers/designers and social innovators from the non-profit, commercial and public sector. Their task is for a couple of days, paired up in teams, to build effective web-based solutions to real social problems.

Based on the successful model pioneered in the United Kingdom, Social Innovation Camp CEE aims to jumpstart a “digital activist” movement across the Central European region, committed to using the Internet for social change.

Beside participation, following Dan on his website  https://www.internetartizans.co.uk/ is a useful activity.