– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
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)

CeDEM12 presents the following tracks:

• E-Participation
• Government 2.0
• Social/Web Media and Public Administration
• E-Politics and E-Campaigning
• European Citizen Initiative
• Participatory Budgeting
• Bottom-Up Movements
• Open Data and Open Access

Publications:

Important Dates: 

CeDEM11: The international “Conference on E-Democracy and Open Government 2011” takes place in Krems (Austria) on 5 and 6 May 2011. A substantial supporting programme has already been planned.

Follow these Links for further Information

• Registration
• Detailed Conference Programme
• Supporting Programme and Workshops

www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government

5-6 May 2011
Krems, Austria
www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

Tracks

• E-Participation
• Open Data and Open Access
• Open Government
• E-Voting

Submissions

• Extended deadline: 16 January 2011
• 12 pages maximum
• Double-blind peer review

Conference Proceedings

• Print version and
• OA online version (eBook).
• Best papers will be published with the OA eJournal JeDEM

Detailed Information

• Conference Website

Call for Papers

During the last 10 years, the world has focused on social media and the new forms of societal behaviour, including content generation, collaboration and sharing as well as network organisation. These behaviours and expectations, in particular transparency and access to data, new ways of interacting with government and democratic institutions will continue to develop, and profound changes in society are to be expected. Society has been confronted with “Open Government”, “Open Data” and “Open Access”. What have the experiences been so far? How do these impact society, democratic structures and organisations? What changes occur at citizen level? What are the implications for democracy, society, science and business?

CeDEM11 presents the following tracks, which focus on these changes:

Track: E-participation

Co-chairs: Julia Glidden (21c Consultancy, UK) and Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute, DK)

Track: Open Access and Open Data

Co-chair: Andy Williamson (Hansard Society, UK)

Track: Open Government

Co-chairs: Philipp Müller (University of Salzburg, Business School, AT) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology, AUS)

Track: E-voting

Co-chairs: Melanie Volkamer (Technical University Darmstadt, GER) and Thad Hall (University of Utah, USA)

.

Deadline for submissions of papers and workshop proposals is 1 December 2010. Submissions shall be 12 pages maximum.

The conference proceedings will be published with the Edition Danube University; additionally the complete proceedings will be made accessible online. A selection of the best papers of CeDEM11 will be published with the Open Access eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (www.jedem.org).

.

We would like to invite individuals from academic, applied and practitioner backgrounds as well as public authorities, NGO/NPOs, education institutions and independent organisations to submit their research and project papers as well as workshop proposals related to the CeDEM11 Tracks.  We welcome different multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches and disciplines including (but not limited to): law & legal studies, social sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, psychology, sociology, applied computer gaming and simulation, democratic theory, media and communication sciences.

Conference Chairs: Peter Parycek (Danube University Krems, AT), Manuel J. Kripp (E-Voting.CC, AT) and Noella Edelmann (Danube University Krems, AT)

.

Keynotes

Axel Bruns (Associate Professor, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, AUS)

Stefan Gehrke (CEO, Politik-Digital, Berlin, GER)

Caroline Haythornthwaite (Director, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, CAN)

Elke Löffler (CEO, Governance International, Birmingham, UK)

Doug Schuler (Program Director for the Public Sphere Project; Member of the Faculty at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA)

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Conference Website: https://www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

The video below shows the Government 2.0 Camp 2009 and keeping the development in Germany since then in mind this year’s crowd will possibly be even bigger:

A look at the sessions planning site shows the wide variety of topics that will be discussed: Open Source for Governments, law making processes using Government 2.0, Open Data, How to learn from Wikipedia and the list goes on.

After the great success of last year this year’s event puts a new twist on the open format of the unconference by splitting the event into two days and also two locations (both right in the city centre).

Day one (September 30st; 1pm till 7pm) will take place in the Bavarian Representation at the Federal Government in Berlin. This day will serve both as an introduction to the field for new attendees and interested persons and also provide room for a pre-planned program with high-level speakers.

The location for the second day (October 1st; 8:45am till 5:30pm) will be the Bertelsmann Foundations premises. This day will be held as an open unconference with attendees providing the contents of the sessions and lots of room for discussion and networking. You can add your idea for a session to this spreadsheet.

If you cannot join the event in person I would suggest following the #g20c hashtag on Twitter for comments and remarks from the participants and to give your input to the sessions.

As the Gov2.0 Camp attended by German speakers and most sessions are done in German the event is a great companion to the internationally focussed PEP-NET Summit a week earlier in Hamburg.

KEYNOTE

ANN MACINTOSH (UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS):  ARGUMENT VISUALISATION ? THE KEY TO UNLOCKING ONLINE DELIBERATION??

„The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.“ (Oscar Wilde)

Macintosh presentation focused on argument visualisation with reference to it’s possible value for policy making. Before combining these two research topics, she summarised the history and current state of research in the field of online deliberation by browsing to the main arguments of the following book titles which argue the need for deliberation:

• Hay 2007: Why we hate politics
• Stoker 2006: Why politics matter: Making demoracy work
• Fishkin 1991: Democracy and deliberation
• Dryzek 200: Deliberative democracy and beyon

Others then claimed a potential of the internet for enhancing deliberation, like Dahlgren 2005: The internet public sphere. Whilst this is not a new research area (see Dutton 1992: Political Science research on teledemocracy), with the more sophisticated technology of today we are moving from the traditional text-based to a new form of deliberation. And with people using the web 2.0 a much bigger audience is attracted. Macintosh argued that the linear form of information in debate fails to capture real life argument patterns and does not enable people to think of arguments. The capacity of technology has not been like we expected it in the 90ies. It’s potential to enhance democracy has not been realised yet. Why is that? The overall reason might be to many expectations: One one hand, we are expecting too much from governments and politicians (they need to give up power), on the other hand too much of the citizens (e.g. with reference to the digital divide). Not least we’re also expecting too much of technology.

Online deliberation presents large problem spaces. Coming up with an own opinion and to formulate an informal contribution is difficult, especially when taking into account the complexity of policy development. From the socio-technical perspective, the problems are the following:

• making sense of unstructured text
• knowing what critical questions to ask
• ensuring inclusive deliberation.

This is where argument mapping comes into play – seen as a tool to make sense of unstructured text and visualising language. Argument visualisation provides an alternative way of representing text in online deliberation forms. TheODET 2010 workshop was dealing with online deliberation tools emerging from the labs. If you are interested in argument mapping it is worth browsing the posts tagged „argument mapping“ on https://digitalcitizenship.co.uk where you’ll find a video covering some of the tools presented at the conference.

SESSION 1

YANNIS CHARALABIDIS: TOWARDS A SYSTEMATIC EXPLOITATION OF WEB 2.0 AND SIMULATION MODELLING TOOLS IN PUBLIC POLICY PROCESSES

The idea of the PADGETS concept is not to pull users into sites but to go where they already are, bringing together two well established domains; the mashup architectural approach of web 2.0 for creating web applications (gadgets) and the methodology of system dynamics in analyzing complex system behaviour. The objective is to develop and deploy a toolset that will allow policy makers to graphically create web applications that will be deployed in the environment of underlying knowledge in Web 2.0 media. To overcome the problem of politicans giving low feedback one could combine the tool with election times.

PIETRO SPERONI DI FENIZIO: DON’T VOTE, EVOLVE!

This was basically a mathematical approach to the following question related to eVoting processes: Given an open question, how can we find an answer that has the most wide support? Whilst open questions are more related to consulatation (example for an open question: „What’s the meaning of life?“), closed questions are typical eVoting questions (e.g. „Does god exist?“). The presented concept aims at providing a final document representing the will of people through an unification of answers in order to find an agreement. In a system where users come up with answers to a question and vote for the answers this is done by a genetic algorithm of answers: one is only allowed to fairly throw away an answer from a mathematical point of view. Different answers compete, and to overcome the problem of the tyranny of the majority only answeres dominated by others are taken away. Applying the Pareto Frontconcept, the most dominant answer will always stay there and each person will find at least one of the answers he/she has voted for in the Pareto Front.

TODD GRAHAM: THE USE OF EXPRESSIVES IN ONLINE POLITICAL TALK: IMPEDING OR FACILITATING THE NORMATIVE GOALS OF DELIBERATION?

Graham examined everyday informal political talk by examining speech talks and the role of expressive talks in online political talk of the Guardian. Expressives are notions like humour, emotional comments and acknowledgement. By applying content analysis and textual analysis he found that 43 % of the postings contained humour. 29 % expressions were emotions (e.g. anger) and 28 % acknowledgements. Especially rational humour plays a substantial role amongst the codes for extended debate. Graham propsees to go beyond the analysis of sheer text and not to neglect expressives when looking at the normative conditions of deliberation.

In the afternoon, I listened to the track focusing on the evaluation of eParticipation projects.VoicE and VoiceS were projects aiming for giving people a voice in EU legislation.

SABRINA SCHERER: A REGIONAL MODEL FOR E?PARTICIPATION IN THE EU: EVALUATION AND LESSONS LEARNED FROM VOICE AND VOICES

The thematic scope of the project VoicE was on consumer protection. VoicE is a regional eParticipation model as an means to attract citizens for EU policies and to motivate them to participate. Evaluation followed the Model of Mcintosh and Whyte (2008). About 200 useres a day visited the website. However, there was low active participation and few reactions from politicians – the involvement of politicians could not be successfully implemented. Retrospectively one can also say that information how to influence the policy making process was not transparent enough for the useres. The regional approach was good in principle, but it is hard to realise a real impact on Brussels. Moreover, the target group was very homogeneous. VoiceS continues the project. Recommendations for VoiceS include that the topic of discussion and substantial media coverage are crucial. It is important to have a well-defined participation process. A more interactive platform aiming at a smaller target group is liketly to be more successful. A new feature of the successor project includes a game where citizens can take on the role of either a EU commissioner, a parliamentarian, a lobbyist or a minister. Participation sections are integrated in a news section as most of the visitors come to the platform via search engines when looking for information on the topic consumer protection.

Thank you for the organisers of EGOV 2010 and ePart 2010 for your efforts – keep up the good work!

• Information on next year’s EGOV and ePart 2010 conferences
• CEDEM 2011 conference on eDemocracy, eParticipation, eVoting and Open Government

EGOV 2010 OPENING

The EGOV 2010 was taking place outside the DEXA framework for the first time this year, starting with some facts and figures about this year’s papers and the invitation to the next conference in Delfth (15 min. from Amsterdam) 2011. Keynote K. Holkeri from Finland focused on open and inclusive policy making.

KATJU HOLKERI FOCUS ON CITIZENS ? OPEN AND INCLUSIVE POLICY?MAKING

„It makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear“ (B. Obama to chinese students)

Fins tend to think that they’re very good in inclusion. However, one has to distinguish between traditional consultation (government as an owner, consultation when work is done) and participation and inclusion with a variety of tools. The instrumental reasons for going from participation 1.0 to 2.0 are a better outcome, lest costs, higher compliance, a respondense to greater diversity and innovative solutions. According to Holkeri, innovation is one of the key issue of governments as they struggle with innovative options. Consequently, what Holkeri expects most from research is research on innovation.

Whilst in Finland there is a good basis of democracy, one could also see a tendency towards a so called „tired democracy“: openness is good, but trust in the government is still declining. The OECD therefore published a list of principles for open and inclusive policy making. Holkeri also addressed the risks of this concept, e.g. delay in policy making, hijacking by special interest groups, conflicts with the roles of politicians, administrative burden or consulation fatigue. Now why does not everyone participate anyways? According to a Finnish survey, the first reason is a low interest in politics, followed by low trust in governemnts and a lack of time. Other reasons are that people see no personal gain or believe that interestests are protected by others. Very few are content with current politics and even noone is unsatisfied with existing tools. Now what we should focus on is a common commitment and strategy as opposed to only several tools.

A finnish project with 800 young visitors a month is habbo hotel.

CITIZEN PERSPECTIVE

The track on the citizen’s perspective somehow lacked the real citizen focus but covered a broad range of studies from the improvement of e-mail-communication using language technology to the development of a framework for enriched online discussion forums for policy making. The IMAIL project aims to increase the quality and efficiency of office work by automatically answering emails from citizens for officers with answer templates. Interestingly enough, about 42 % of incoming emails to an European education provider could be answered with 9 different standard answers (Scheffer 2004). A Swedish social insurance agency receives around 40.000 emails per month with 640 handling officers. More information on the other text analysis project, IMPACT (Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis) can be found here. This is more or less only for participants who are willing wo participate in complex systems.

SHARON DAWES (NY): STRATEGIES FOR OPEN GOVERNMENT: TOWARD A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA

Dawes gave an overview about Open Government and escpecially the Open Data strategy, pointing out what’s old and new and focusing on both praise and criticism of the concept. There is a long tradition of open access and open information, but what is new is the commitment to openness without the citizens having to request information. (pro-active data release). Points of criticism are: uneven usability and no support, stewardship practises, questionable relevance of content, inadequate metadata or lack of feedback mechanisms. Research findings showed that the fitness for use determines the value of data for any given use or user. Moreover, understanding data also requires to understand how data is produced. A case study of parcel data (selected organisations were interviewed) examined costs, issues, interest, uses and flow of the data. It showed that the stakeholders identified are quite different. Dawes’ recommendations for governments were to build data dissemination policies into regular business and to ensure meta data standards as well as a support for users and officials. Research should focus on the following topics: Which information creates which value?; the exploration of public value proposition from multiple perspectives; the development of tools and mashups.

The track also included an analysis of the structure of the eGov-community by a citation network and social networks analysis.

CHRISTOPH SCHALLER: ADVANCED COCKPITS FOR MUNICIPALITIES: FOCUSING ON THE RELEVANCE AND CHALLENGES OF IMPORTING DATA

The goal of this project assessed in pilot municipalities was to develop a web-based management cockpit for strategic and info-based leadership drawing on the fact that management is becoming increasingly difficult in small and middle municipalities. From the IT point of view one can adapt business intelligence models for municipalities. The data types used for this project were basically citizens register data and financial data. One of the lessons learned from the project is that it is absolutely necessary to import detailed data and to pay special attention to data quality and data protection regulations. Further activities include user training and ensuring the long-term activity of the cockpit. Project details to be found on gemeindecockpit.ch.

DZHUMALIEVA, STEFKA: VALUE ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR ICT PROJECTS AT THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION

The VAST tool is designed to examine the value and therefore the success of ICT projects in terms of efficiency (monetary value) and public value. Public organisations are increasingly managed with constant or diminishing resources and decisions for new investments have to be taken cautiously. Building on existing value assessment methodologies, VAST is a custom-made value assessment tool tailored to the context of the European Commission. Its use helps to identify the value of an ICT project going beyond the traditional financial paradigm and allows cross-comparison between similar projects.

]]> https://pep-net.eu/blog/2010/09/02/ifip-e-gov-2010-lausanne/feed/ 0 https://pep-net.eu/blog/2010/07/23/evote-2010-in-bregenz/ https://pep-net.eu/blog/2010/07/23/evote-2010-in-bregenz/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:13:37 +0000 https://pep-net.eu/?p=3035

The 4th international conference on e-voting just started. Taking place in Castle Hofen, a small castle near Bregenz, This year’s meeting is co-organized by E-Voting.CC, the Council of Europe and the German Gesellschaft für Informatik. Around 70 international experts will discuss the latest developments in e-voting. The topics range from practical experience reports to certification and end-to-end verification. [a visiter’s report]
The official hashtag for the conference is #evote2010.

After the welcome speech of chairman Robert Krimmer and a big thank you to the sponsors and partners Michael Remmert gave an overview of the activities of the organisers and yesterdays workshop (on a draft on international guidelines on e-voting and transparency of e-voting systems. The Council of Europe has taken notice of the topic e-voting, e.g. with the Comittee of Ministers on e-democracy. Since 2005 a lot has been achieved and there are a number of tools that can be used. However, in the upcoming years the Council will change its focus and concentrate more on the governance of the internet following democratic principles.

KEYNOTE: DONETTA DAVIDSON (CHAIR U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION – EAC).

Davidson was nominatd by President Bush in 2005 and served at all levels of government (which is, according to her, somewhat unique for the U.S. ) As for the kind of equipment used for elections, the U.S. have a very decentralised system. Federal Elections are held every two years. This requires a lot of implements from the state, like voting systems that meet the requirements detailed in HAVA (Help America Vote Act from 2002), such as accessibility. (Help Amercia Vote Act from 2002). This act was based on the government funding an election reform for the first time. Davidson gave an overview on the systems currently tested and election guidelines. For instance, there has been an update to the 2005 guidelines (VVSG 2005). Goals included bringing along tests associated with the included 2.0 material. At the moment a complete rewrite of this guidelines is in the planning. The drafting of the „Pilot Standards“ was an iterative process that was made very transparent to the public. State Pilot Projects included the Arizona Democratic Primary (2000 with 41 % internet voters), the Michigan Democratic Caucus (2004), Project Bravo (2008 used in three different areas with a paper reord printed for each vote and used for verifying results) or Democrats Abroad (2008 with overseas citizens worldwide able to ast a ballot in the 2008 Democratic Primary).  Soe problems in the U.S. are that there are still over 30 states doing fax or the clarification of responsibilities.

More work on the EAC (including test series) to be found on www.eac.gov

CHARLES STEWART, R. MICHAEL ALVAREZ, THAD HALL: VOTING TECHNOLOGY AND THE ELECTION EXPERIENCE: THE 2009 GUBERNATORIAL RACES IN NEW JERSEY AND VIRGINIA.

Thad Hall presented a survey on peoples attitute on voting experiences. For the research framework, the context in which elections occur was important. The study was conducted in 2007, 2008 (2) and 2009 (4 times in total), including the experience of all voters (1.200 interviews in New Jersey, 1.300 in Virginia). The study looked at different aspects, e.g. the time people were waiting for elections or changes in voter confidence. Voter confidence was also put into relation with confidence with technology or the issue of privacy. Another big factor is whether people had problems with technology in the past. To sum up an interesting talk, we can draw the following conclusions:

• Voting technology implementation always occurs in a context (previous experiences, concerns about fraud)
• Developing summary measures of voting experiences is very important (confidence and evaluations of usability)
• Technology is important for information seeking – but not for all voters

Voter confidence was significantly related to race and former voting experiences. However, the number of people having problems was very low. Electronic voting in the U.S. context is often related to the „mother effect“: „I can do this, but I am not sure whether my mother can do this.“ If you then ask the mother, she would tell the same about here mother and so on.

ROBERT KRIMMER: THE USE OF E-VOTING IN THE FEDERATION OF STUDENTS ELECTIONS 2009

Krimmer raised the question why e-voting is a topic both interesting and of high dispute in Austria. The information society in Austria is based on a Central Citizen Register since 2001 and the Citizen Card. Therefore, identification is not the problem, but there are issues with ensuring privacy in the e-voting process. The first idea to talk about e-voting was for the Federation of Students. There were, as opposed to the plans of the Federal Chacellery, high tensions from the beginning: protests from the representatives of the students and a public discussion arount voter coercion and transparency. Even though data protection was guaranteed, people had fears about techology sucking out all their data and a secure voting process. In the election phase, 21 universities took part. Internet-voting was placed one week before the paper-based election (5 full days). In case the e-voting would have had problems people would have been requested to come to the polling stations. (On a side note, one of the major problems back then for the students (remembering the code for the ID card) is gone by now.)

After the election there were complaints in the newspapers that the eletronic voting system nearly destroyed the whole voting process (many people will know the discussion). There was a destruction of data (physical and thermal), 5 appeals to the constituional court and there is still tension going on. According to Krimmer many people felt left out in the implementation process and technology didn’t convince the voters in this case. Further developments like the usage of cellphones might help in the future as the smart card is part of the problem. However, it was a very neccesary experience and further serious discussions are needed.

Advantages that might convince the strong opposition might be found where there are similar intentions, like transparency and more engagement. If you’re interested in the discussions and happen to be looking for arguments against e-voting for a change (or media sources related to the topic), papierwahl.at is collecting critical or negative aspects of e-voting.

STEFAN POPOVENIUC (GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY): SCANTEGRITY MOCK ELECTION AT TAKOMA PARK

This is another e-voting case study. To keep my post short , I’ll just sum up the major points of criticism towards e-voting as I found them significant: This is too complicated, real voters won’t use it, don’t need it, don’t want it, you need to be a geek to use it, only the elite can use it (maybe we should add: my mother can’t use it ).

LETIZIA CAPORUSSO: THE ROLE OF TRUST, PARTICIPATION AND IDENTITY IN THE PROPENSITY TO E- & I-VOTE

Will e- or i-voting revolutionise democracy? Will it reduce costs, limit errors, be too easy, individualise democracy, appeal minorities? For instance, different researches address the lack of association between the ability to e-vote and socio-demographic characteristics. The data Caporusso is referring to came from a small area in Italy. She wanted to understand whether those people who trust the government would be more inclined to vote over the internet. Interestingly enough, the elderly, but also young people, are more skeptical toward electronic and internet voting (curvilinear effect). This finding is consistent with other research in advance. Not too surprisingly, people who tend to trust the generalised other are more likely to trust e-/i-voting. I-voting appeals slightly more to those who did not vote in the last general elections, but this is not a statistical significant result. E- and i-voting tend to attract the more politically engaged, but there is little evidence that it will allow more people to vote.