Because this paper needs to be read and, more important, discussed while its analyses are still current.

Thus, we have decided to make it provisionally available through PeP-NET. To start such a conversation, what better place than PeP-NET, the Pan European eParticipation network?
We have spent many hundreds of hours researching and writing the paper, as we struggled to make sense of the developments and “under-developments” of eParticipation in the last ten years.
Our appraisal is based on an extensive and interdisciplinary analysis of distinct relevant sources, which included the most recent reports, articles and literature reviews dealing with eParticipation research, practice and theory, as well as projects’ deliverables and evaluations, related databases, and our direct examination of eParticipation systems.
We had to resort to a very varied bunch of disciplines (from history and medicine to Mayan performing arts; seriously!! ) to be able to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the field’s challenges… and to make a compelling exposition of them.

The paper ended up being “quite controversial”, as our assessment of eParticipation came to suggest that some of the problems that have hampered its progress have a systemic, overarching character: that kind of ‘elephant in the living room’-issues whose very existence tends to be denied because of their complexity or the embarrassment they cause and, as a result, cannot normally be acknowledged or discussed, let alone get properly sorted out.

Examples of the “embarrassing questions” the paper poses are:

• How can it be that after 10 years… all relevant ‘agendas’ of eParticipation research are still reported as underdeveloped?
• And how can it be that even the most basic questions –for example: the relation of Participation and eParticipation, or the understanding of the dual nature of eParticipaton as something that can be driven by authorities or by citizens themselves– remain unsolved?
• More than 187 millions of Euros were invested in the last ten years to promote experimentation in the field, so… where are the results? Where are the breakthroughs and the research milestones? Can we feel satisfied with just some “vague confirmations” of ideas that 10 years ago could already have been easily guessed?

Through the paper, we have done our best to constructively diagnose eParticipation and to propose some treatments for the field’s maladies. But our perspective and understanding are necessarily limited: the real “treatment” for those problems would require a reflection process that involves the whole eParticipation community.

We see this paper as an urgent “call for self-reflection” and consider it a “MUST READ” for anyone involved in European eParticipation: from the officials working at EC’s Directorate for Information society and Media, to the researchers, practitioners, NGOs, public workers, citizen associations… and even any interested European citizen.

Therefore, we would like to encourage all our PeP-NET friends and in general all people with interest in eParticipation… to have a look at the paper during this nice summer weekend.
Anyone who feels “touched” by any of the paper’s claims and argumentations… should speak up and comment to this post. It doesn’t matter if it is to support, extend or complement our asseverations, or to oppose, challenge or further qualify them… please, share your views.
PeP-NET was meant to be a HUB for the conversations around eParticipation. So… let’s discuss. It is important that the issues we showed –be them real or imagined– are talked about, and possibly acted upon.

The environment where we operate is moving. Moving faster and faster. And in the context of the ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’ and its flagship initiative “Innovation Union”, which aims to renew EU’s “Research and Innovation Funding Programmes”, the most important question we need to answer is: “What do we do now??”
For sure, we could keep pretending that there is NO elephant in the living room. Stay in our “academic” Ivory Tower, and just continue doing as we did so far… while we wait for the “barbarians of eParticipation” to arrive, change the democratic landscape by really integrating ICT in governance… and make fools of all us. PeP-NET subscribers included.

But in our association we want to believe that we, the European eParticipation Community, could do much better than that.

So… no more to say!! Thank you very much for your attention. We hope some of you enjoy reading of our paper and some exchange of ideas can happen afterwards.

—–   ADDITION: A  CONCEPTUAL  MAP  SUMMARISING  PAPER’S  KEY  FINDINGS   —–

Several people asked for a “summary” version of the paper. Here you have a JPG image (2,5 Mbytes) displaying a Conceptual Map that summarises the paper’s key findings.
I recommend you to save the file first, and then open it with an image editor (like Office Picture Manager) to watch it. It’ll be more easy for you to zoom in and out in the different parts of the image.

You can find the video here or embedded below:

From this point of view, our current multi-crisis-dilemma can be understood as a general crisis of today´s democracies, basically caused by its over-complexity and the lack of appropriate knowledge management systems based on the integration of collective knowledge.

It is now widely accepted, that only multi-stakeholder-inclusion can support our institutions with the necessary knowledge to face our challenges at stake. This requires a more networked approach of governance and a knowledge management based on public spaces for policy deliberation [3], [4].

But although the resulting frustration in the European population is manifested in decreasing voter turnouts on the one hand, and the use of ICT for eCampaigning and proactive action planning increases on the other hand, most eParticipation projects show quite a low citizen participation [5]. To understand this paradox it would be important to have a closer look at the technical tools and socio-political concepts being used in today’s eParticipation.

References:

[1] Hisschemöller, Matthias: Participation as Knowledge Production and the Limits of Democracy; In: Maasen, S. & Weingart, P. 2005: Democratization of Expertise?: Exploring novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-Making, Dordrecht, NL

[2] OECD 2003: The learning government: Introduction and draft results of the survey of knowledge management practice in Ministries, 27th session of Public Management Committee, 3-4th

[3] Blumler, J.G., Coleman, S. 2001: Realizing Democracy Online: A civic commons in Cyberspace, IPPR/Citizens Online Research Publications, No 2, Mar 2001

[4] Centeno, van Bavel, Burgelman 2005: A Prospective View of e-Government in the European Union, Electronic Journal of e-Government, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 59-66

[5] Millard, J.2009: eParticipation, European Journal of ePractice, No. 7, March 2009

This article is an extract from our paper for this years EDem conference in Krems.The whole paper will be published by the Austrian Computer Society under the titel „BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN E-PARTICIPATION APPROACHES - E-PARTICIPATION AS ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP”

The EDem conference series is jointly organised by the Danube University Krems and the University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna.

As we now have been PEP-NET member for about two months, we now finally would like to introduce echo to the ones who may not knows us yet – better late than never

Motivation and image

Today humanity is facing some serious environmental, economic and humanitarian challenges never seen before. However, satisfactory solutions are not in sight. The lack of transparency in political decision making provokes a growing sense of powerlessness and political resignation among the population and weakens people’s faith in democracy. Calls for transparency and more participation are growing louder.

The current crises can thus be understood as a general crisis of democracy.

New ways have to be found, empowering people to develop constructive solutions to effectively tackle our “glocal” challenges. This is why echo has been founded: As a platform for sustainable change and active citizen participation echo enables a new form of non-partisan participatory democracy on local, regional and global level. With echo the first web-application is being developed to enable collective intelligence through democratic discourse even with a virtually unlimited number of participants.

echo offers a quick overview of interesting discussions, gives people an opportunity to voice their opinions in a deliberative discourse and to jointly find the right solutions. On echo, people can connect with allies, experts and decision makers and together turn their decision into reality.

echo consists of three clearly separated functional areas, which at the same time are tightly interwoven:

Discuss, Connect, Act!

Discuss is the core area, which contains most unique features and enables collective intelligence to emerge. The discussions taking place in the discussion area offer a differentiated overview of the different statements edited and supported by certain regions or societal groups.

Every statement is edited through a self organized democratic process (without the need of moderators or admins). Thanks to the new semantic cross-language search engine, users can find easily a comprehensive selection of relevant information. With only minimal effort thousands of users can contribute to the dynamic evolution of sound statements.

Connect offers users an easy possibility to organizes their contacts, add interesting experts and opinion leaders their personal network and to connect people with specific competences relevant to a certain subject. To enhance usability and foster a viral growth there will be interfaces connecting several external social networks like twitter and facebook.

Act! motivates the participants of discussions to proactively launch actions and projects, to jointly turn their ideas and visions into reality, and thus, make change visible in every day life. To do so, echo offers a virtual work space equipped with the necessary tools and information to efficiently plan and accomplish different kinds of actions and projects and found eco-socially sustainable businesses.

As most actions and projects will need funding, echo is based on powerful business models. “Powerful“ does not merely mean working cost-covering. It also means helping users to provide their actions with the necessary funds. This enables people to accomplish their goals and lets their virtual engagement influence our real world in a positive way, which is the key to motivate ever more people to participate on echo. Thus, the comprehensive concept of echo has true potential to free people from their sense of powerlessness, offer them a way of successful self-determination and help them restore their faith in democracy.

Create Synergies

In order to overcome the limitations of individual platforms, echo employs a distributed approach and makes its functionality available throughout the whole Internet. Accordingly, relevant discussions and actions from echo can be displayed and edited on any web page and blog. In this way, echo complements the functionality of other platforms and creates true synergies, instead of hamstringing competition.

Shared User- and Opinion Base

Through cooperation with echo, partner platforms connect their communities with each other. This way, their different user groups are joint together in a single cross-platform community. The users can now connect throughout all platforms, discuss and jointly launch actions and projects.

Moreover, echo addresses to users on a larger scale exceeding such groups from existing platforms through an extended network with further organizations. This in turn, multiplies the range and influence of each single partner platform. Projects and campaigns profit from the viral dissemination and its huge and highly motivated community.

Discussions on issues, which are relevant to the different partner platforms can be initiated on any other partner platform, thus, enriching discussions and making them more interesting and alive. This way a much broader opinion base is formed, as possibly could emerge on any single platform. New impulses and issues flow back and forth, enriching discussions and rising the attractiveness of all partner platforms.

This thematic diversity – covering different thematic fields and ranging broadly and deeply into society – rises virality enormously. The synergetic effects allow for a common development of content throughout different communities, which offers interesting information to virtually every Internet user. Thus, the influence of the proposals elaborated in this distributed system will boost its influence on society enormously.

Contact

www.echologic.org

team@echologic.org

www.blog-echologic.org

www.echonomyJAM.org

The debate aim to answer an array of questions relevant to democracy and surrounding the new European Citizens’ Initiative. The event will be hosted by Richard MEDI?, European Media and Communications Expert (former AER Spokesman).

The main speakers include: Sebastian KURPAS, a representative from the European Commission and Johannes W. PICHLER, Professor for European Law at the University of Graz and Director of the Austrian Institute for European Law and Politics in Salzburg (AT).

The initiative is part of the “AER Communications Atelier” under the new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) the Steiermark Office Brussels will be hosted by the AER (Assembly of European Regions). It is also the first time the “AER Communications Atelier” gives interested parties the opportunity to follow the discussion as a live-stream and to participate actively in the discussion on https://europa.steiermark.at/stream

Danish Technological Institute/Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen

His death generated the most tweets per second on Twitter since Barack Obama was elected president. In fact many of my friends in remote locations at festivals such as Glastonbury (UK) learned of the shocking news through SMS and Twitter on their mobiles, Blackberry’s and iPhones as cyberspace began to go into frenzy.

This event raised many fundamental issues about the capacity of the internet that is critical to participation and democracy, as well as highlighting the global difference in how countries trust official and unofficial sources of information 

For example, the “Michael Jackson outage” on the net (caused by the West accessing many ‘official’ sources of trusted information) resulted in many users who were finding the tool critical for organising protest in Iran unable to access their usual sources of ‘unofficial’ information, thereby effectively delaying demonstrations. 

Ironically, despite the mainly unsuccessful efforts of the Iranian regime to shut down participation in the form of protests by denying citizens access to technology, it was actually the West who temporarily (albeit unintentionally) succeeded in achieving this feat through its overuse.

A clash of hunger for knowledge from official sources vs. the need to organize knowledge against official sources does raise interesting contrasts and demonstrates how far new media has the ability to focus our thoughts and actions in a modern world.

ICT-enabled government, participation and democracy can contribute to the objectives of inclusion in a variety of ways: by providing new ICT-enabled channels for delivering government services and making these services more accessible for people with special needs (eServices eAccessibility); making the democratic p process and governmental decision making more transparent, consultative and participatory through online information provision in all relevant languages and formats, deliberative initiatives and empowerment of advocacy groups that serve at-risk groups (eEngagement), and, by harnessing the same tools in a targeted fashion to make inclusion policies and initiatives themselves more transparent, participatory and accountable and by stepping up the provision of content relevant to groups at risk of exclusion.

Participation within an inclusive governance model is possible only if political, economic, technological and social barriers are removed and access to these opportunities is equitably distributed. Easy access to (ICT) is a prerequisite for participation. Facilitating this access entails, inter alia, removing barriers, making ICT tools easier for everyone to use, and encouraging people to use them by raising awareness of their economic and social benefits.

Progress in this area remains fragmented and slow, despite such targets and many actions involving public authorities, industry and civil society. Accessibility of public websites remains stuck at 5%. Only 10% of people aged over 64 are Internet users while the average in Europe is 47%. Without further intervention, the gap will only be halved in 2015 instead of 2010. The latest assessments conducted for the Commission show that accessibility of websites, communication terminals, TV sets and other ICT remains problematic, with lower-educated, economically inactive and elderly people at the greatest risk of being left behind.

As some of you probably know, 2009 will be the first time, ePart, a new International Conference on eParticipation (www.demo-net.org/epart), will take place following the 8^th international EGOV conference 2009 (part of the DEXA conference cluster, www.dexa.org). ePart is dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy. ePart will take place 3-4 September 2009 in Linz (AT), i.e. right after EGOV conference 30 August to 2 September 2009 with which ePart will be co-located.

A call for papers and workshops/panels is published for both the 2009 ePart and (EGOV www.egov-conference.org/egov-2009).

Contributions may be in the form of scientific papers (distinguishing between completed research and ongoing research), project presentations, and workshops. Each format encourages scientific rigor and discussions of the state-of-the-art, innovative research in progress, studies of practical eGovernment/eGovernance, eParticipation and eDemocracy projects, as well as system implementations.

Accepted papers will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Ongoing research and project papers will be published in the Trauner (Linz, AT) proceedings.

Important dates include:

• Submission of papers:  28 February 2009
• Submission of workshop/panel proposals: 15 April 2009
• Submission of PhD projects:  15 April 2009
• Notification of acceptance for papers: 15 April 2009
• Notification of workshops/panels/PhD projects: 15 May 2009
• EGOV conference: 30 August to 2 September 2009
• ePart conference: 3-4 September 2009

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Danish Technological Institute

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you may already know the European Journal of ePractice (EjeP), but do you know that the next special edition is devoted entirely to eParticipation!

The 6th issue of the Journal provides a good chance to write articles based on our work and experiences and provide an excellent opportunity to public, disseminate and most importantly to exchange experiences and ideas.

Launched in November 2007 the Journal belongs to the ePractice.eu community and is sponsored by the European Commission as part of its good practice exchange activity and is run by an independent Editorial Board.

The aim of the Journal is to reinforce the visibility of articles as well as that of professionals while strengthen the overall ePractice.eu activity. The Journal promotes the diffusion and exchange of good practice in eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion and is available to all potential readers free of charge. The Journal currently has an audience of 50,000 professionals in Europe and beyond, and build on a community of some 14,000 members.

The deadline is 8 December, but I know that the editor for the eParticipation issue Jeremy Millard can be pursuaded to extent the deadline till the second half of December if asked nicely. Relevant links are provided below.

Call: https://www.epracticejournal.eu/info/11

Submission guidelines: https://www.epracticejournal.eu/guidelines

European Journal of ePractice: https://www.epracticejournal.eu/home

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen

Danish Technological Insitute

The summit and consultation process focused on ten areas deemed critical for Australia’s future i.e.:

• The productivity agenda – education, skills, training, science and innovation
• The future of the Australian economy
• Population, sustainability, climate change and water
• Future directions for rural industries and rural communities
• A long-term national health strategy – including the challenges of preventative health, workforce planning and the ageing population
• Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion
• Options for the future of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
• Towards a creative Australia: the future of the arts, film and design
• The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, a more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens
• Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world.

Envisaged as a broad consultation on the future direction of the country the Australia 2020 Summit did not embrace ICT to its full extent replying instead on more traditional forums such as the submission of written proposals, an invitation to primary and secondary schools to participate in a series of school summits leading to a youth summit in Canberra (12-13 April) and a number of local summits may be hosted by local Members of Parliament in their respective electorates in advance of the Australia 2020 Summit.

Although the tools chosen the process was supported by a designated website (www.australia2020.gov.au) providing information on the initiative, its progress and outcomes (i.e. eInformation). More interesting in relation to eParticipation the website does have a number of more advanced features including:

• Options for online submission of proposals, print out of the submission form (.RTF and .PDF) for each of the prioritised topics plus the relevant instructions
• Options for viewing submissions made
• Video clips from school and local summits
• Live streaming on demand and web casts from the 19-20 April summit in Windows Media and Adobe Flash Player with links to downloads of these plus QuickTime
• Videos from the school and in particular the youth summit
• Initial and final reports
• Lists of participants from both the youth and the final summit
• List of people in the steering committee including short biographies
• Media hub including a news centre with full transcripts, on demand web casts, image gallery, details on media accreditation and official use of the logo

All in all the Australia 2020 Summit website makes full use of ICT in terms of eInforming and ensures easy access to information and results in relation to the both the public and media. By making the initial submissions, recommendations, reports, lists of summit participants and members of the steering available the initiative also ensure a certain degree of transparency. Unfortunately there is neither contact details included for participants or members of the steering committee nor a blog available for each contact.

Of the submissions made, 1064 are available online including from local summits around the country which in most cases contain multiple proposals and opinions. An added bonus adding to the user friendliness and transparency of the initiative is the fact that online available online can be filtered and are searchable. The filters include the sorting by chronologically (newest/oldest), the ten priority/topic areas, submission ID and name of person, organisation or pre-summit having provided the input, last but not least the submissions can be searched by key words.

Check out the Australia 2020 Summit for further information: www.australia2020.gov.au

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, Business and Policy Analysis, Danish Technological Institute