“Scratching where it doesn’t itch?” Time to talk about eParticipation and elephants 28. July 2011 – 16:49 by Asociacion Ciudades Kyosei / Pedro Prieto-Martin

“The e-(R)evolution will not be funded. An interdisciplinary and critical analysis of the developments and troubles of EU-funded eParticipation” is the title of a paper that our association recently wrote as part of our research and knowledge dissemination efforts. The article is meant to be properly published soon, but some bureaucratic issues have delayed its release more than we can wait.

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.

Posted in ICT, Projects, Tools, Trends, Visions | 23 Comments »

eGovernment Action Plan, Citadel Statement and ECI regulations 15. December 2010 – 10:25 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

Far from winding down for Christmas, this week sees a lot of European eParticipation-related activity in Brussels and Strasbourg. The launch of the eGovernment Action Plan, the presentation of the Citadel Statement and the expected adoption of regulations on the European Citizens’ Initiative by the European Parliament in Strasbourg mean that this is a busy week for European eParticipation enthusiasts.

At the “Lift Off Towards Open Government” in Brussels, Digital Agenda Commissioner and Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes will launch the eGovernment Action Plan 2015. Following the launch, the conference will hear from eParticipation and eGovernment actors from the Commission and across Europe.

At the pre-conference yesterday, Geert Bourgeois (Vice Minister-President of the Flemish Government and Flemish Minister for Administrative Affairs, Local and Provincial Government) launched the Citadel Statement, a pan-European declaration that aims to identify what local government really needs to deliver on the vision set forth in last year’s Malmo Ministerial Declaration on e-government. The Citadel Statement, the result of an open discussion in which anyone could makes suggestions and vote on other people’s suggestions, is broken down into the following headings:

• Common Architecture, Shared Services and Standards
• Open Data, Transparency and Personal Rights
• Citizen Participation and Involvement
• Privacy and Identification of Individuals
• Rural inclusion

Click here for a PDF version of the full press release.

Finally, the European Parliament will vote on regulations that specify in more detail arrangements regarding the European Citizens’ Initiative. The Lisbon Treaty made provision for one million citizens to force the Commission to consider initiating legislation in any area within its remit. A recent petition online called on the Parliament to adopt “effective regulations for the European Citizens’ Initiative”; see my previous post.

Posted in Events, News, Trends | No Comments »

Web 2.0 Update: 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference and 4th European eGovernment Awards 12. November 2009 – 16:22 by Danish Technological Institute

Much focus has been on Web 2.0 technology as an enabler for wider dissemination, awareness raising and not least participation and transparency. It is therefore interesting to see that Web 2.0 technologies are being used in various ways for a range of purposes in this year’s 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference, 18-20 November, in Malmö (Sweden) and 4^th European eGovernment Awards.

Webcast of conference sessions

The plenary sessions and three of the parallel sessions at the Ministerial eGovernment Conference will be webcast live and on demand this year from the conference website www.egov2009.se. In addition the ceremony for the 4^th European eGovernment Awards will most likely also be the subject of a webcast.

The programme is available on www.egov2009.se/programme

Twitter flies over Malmö 18-20 November

In addition to RSS feed, Twitter feed is available onthe Ministerial eGovernment Conference website www.egov2009.se. Participants are actively encourage to Twitter about the Informal Ministerial Meeting on eGovernment and the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference to use the hashtag #egov2009.

Online vote for European eGovernment Awards Public Prize

Following success of the first online vote in relation to the European eGovernment Awards 2007 in Lisbon (Portugal) the European Commission and the European eGovernment Awards Consortium decided early onto continue practicing what they preach.  The objective has been to: increase the visibility and status of public sector ICT projects in Europe; encourage good practice exchange, and; to encourage active involvement and participating in the European eGovernment Awards by the epractice.eu and wider stakeholder communities.

The online voting for the European eGovernment Awards Public Prize was therefore launched late this summer and closed on 11 November at 18:00 CET. Members of the epractice.eu community have been able to vote for their favorite cases from among the 52 European eGovernment Awards 2009 finalists.  The online vote is in addition to other ICT initiative by the awards consortium and the European Commission for a fully electronic submission process via www.epractice.eu and the remote evaluation of the received submissions by the jury in the first phase of the evaluation.

The voting is now closed but the 52 finalist cases remain published at ePractice.eu and are open to receive members’ comments.  The winner of the Public Prize will be announced at the awards ceremony on 19 November at 18:30 – and likely to the subject of a webcast.

Virtual exhibition

For the first time the European eGovernment Awards finalist are accessible online through a virtual exhibition. The virtual exhibition can be visited on www.expopolis.com (NB: for practical reasons you have to register). Naturally an electronic version of the conference exhibition catalogue will be available on www.epractice.eu/awardsmediakit as of 19 November when the Ministerial eGovernment Conference and Exhibition opens.

Other news

Ministerial tour of European eGovernment Awards Finalist stands

A ministerial tour of the European eGovernment Awards Finalists stands will take place on 18 November 2009 at the Ministerial eGovernment Conference and Exhibition. 

Finalist country fact sheets

To enhance the promotion of the European eGovernment Awards Finalists 2009 17 country factsheets from those European countries from which finalists have been selected for the European eGovernment Awards 2009. The factsheets are published in English but will be made available in the relevant national languages in the beginning of November. The fact sheets are available with other dissemination material on www.epractice.eu/en/awardsmediakit

News and background

www.epractice.eu/awards

www.egov2009.se

Danish Technological Institute/Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen – European eGovernment Awards Consortium Partner

Posted in Events, good practice, News, Projects, Tools, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Tenders Electronic Daily – with citizen robots: TedBot 27. October 2009 – 09:54 by Madarász Csaba

I am always loving  the opportunity, to give news of good, impressive, useful services, tools, that are coming from the citizens and their groups, empowered by technology and courage.

Most of us have heard about the Tenders Electronic Daily service of the European Union, which is a compelx service dedicated to European public procurement.

The TedBot is an innovative approach, to visualize the tenders and their results on a google map. In this form, it is a great example of how to use knowledge and personal interest to create an advanced service.

Hopefully, it will catch the eye of the European Comission, and will extend the TED with TedBot, showing a some megabites of wise leadership towards citizen initiatives.

But let’s do listen to the creator:

the TedBot

Posted in good practice, Projects, Tools | No Comments »

Living Labs are truly alive 15. January 2009 – 11:38 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

Participation supported by electronic tools is not just limited to political topics – this has been stated in relation to eParticipation in many discussions. Keeping this in mind the Living Lab approach which aims at involving users and stakeholders into research and development processes by using innovative often time’s electronic ways of organising cooperation is a close cousin of eParticipation. Yesterday I visited the Living Labs Information Day held by the European Commission in Brussels. This event gave me an overview of the LL activity in Europe and the possibilities arising from this trend for player from the eParticipation field.

The projects presented at this event ranged from research in wearable computing involving test sites in the Aerospace, Construction and Automobile industry (wearIT@work) to projects working on environmental friendly lighting in urban areas and different developers of ICT tools sets to making working in a Living Lab context easier. Almost all research and innovation field were present at the event and could make a convincing case that the LL approach is significantly helping them to produce innovation in their field. Besides the variety of participants the number of ca. 250 also spoke to the importance of this approach. In the European Network of Living Labs alone more than 100 LL are involved. The EC also supports this community using different programmes but the representatives where clear that the EC´s job is to support the cross border aspects and not the local or regional development.

The complexity of LL project is very high as dozens and more stakeholders have to be involved in a multi-step development process. The deep experience of the eParticipation community to organise complex communication processes and to work out conflicts in these processes could be of great help to the many different Living Labs active in Europe. It therefore is useful to build contacts into the LL community and try to find possibilities to gain advantages from each other. On concrete step in this direction could be to look for potential partners for future project proposals to the European Commission in that community.

Posted in Trends, TuTech | No Comments »

The European eParticipation Jungle 7. December 2008 – 16:19 by Rolf Luehrs

The European Commission supports eParticpation with lots of different instruments and we are grateful that PEP-NET is among the funded projects. One of the main objectives of our network is, as you may know, to connect the scattered fragments of the eParticipation community or even to help establishing something worth to be called a community.

This is very easy said but much harder done as I experienced the other day. I discovered that the eParticipation scene is more fragmented and relevant information are far more distributed than I expected. And I have to admit that I lost my way in the Commission’s eParticipation jungle.

What has happened? Well, my trip started last week reading Simone’s PEP-NET post about Debate Europe, a project which I stumbled upon a few times without paying to much attention to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Projects | 3 Comments »

Debate Europe – a discussion forum for European citizens 4. December 2008 – 14:16 by Zebralog

Discussion – Dialogue – Debate. That´s the slogan of the official discussion forum by the European Commission, “Debate Europe”. The Commission aims at actively listening to the public and getting involved into dialogue with citizens to raise trust in the European policy and to increase voter participation in the upcoming European elections 2009. The forum “Debate Europe” should gauge public opinion about the EU and about three important pan-European topics: climate change and energy, Europe’s future, Intercultural Dialogue. Additionally there is a forum for more general discussion about the EU and its institutions. European citizens from all Member States are invited to join and to debate with other citizens and members of EU institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Projects, Tools | 2 Comments »

Is fighting cybercrime worth endangering privacy? 3. December 2008 – 13:17 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

The Council of ministers of the European Union issued a press release on November 27^th which states the adoption of a strategy to reinforce the fight against cyber crime. Computer crime or cyber crime is a major problem of the networked world we live in. Spamming, Phishing and Identity theft are just a few of the potential crimes which can be committed using networked computers or other telecommunication devices.

From this angle it seems both reasonable and positive that the European Organisations try to crack down on these kinds of crimes. But a deeper look into the announcement and especially the proposed tools raises doubts and concerns. The Council suggests “operational measures, such as cyber patrols, joint investigation teams and remote searches to become part of the fight against cybercrime in the next five years”. The strategy also includes plans to link the different investigation forces in the member states closer together to improve their efficiency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Trends | 1 Comment »

eParticipation Study publish 216 initaitives identified and first iteration of its recommendations 20. August 2008 – 15:18 by Danish Technological Institute

As part of the ongoing eParticipation study eParticipation Study – titled “Study and supply of services on the development of eParticipation in the EU” -  for the European Commission (DG Information Society and Media) the following project deliverables has been submitted to the client and now published:

• eParticipation good practice cases (D4.2a)
• eParticipation recommendations (D5.1a)

As part of the study’s initial analysis of eParticipation practitioner initiatives in Europe 216 cases from 18 countries and in 29 different languages have been identified to date and are initially available on our project website.

The first of three iterations of eParticipation related recommendations is also available now on our project website. At the end of the study the third and final iteration will provide a set of practical, and intellectually rigorous, recommendations. The recommendations aim to answer and specify (mainly at European level) the following:

• What should be done by whom?
• How this may be achieved?
• Which types of ICT can be used?
• How other types of media can be involved?

However, rather than attempting to provide recommendations at this early stage of the project, this first iteration pose a number of tentative questions. Questions which reflect some of the main lines of enquiry appropriate to the study and may help frame the final recommendations. The questions have arisen as a result of the work carried out to date and the current report may as a result also serve as a partial overview of the study as it currently stands.

The next wave of deliverables is foreseen for publication in October/Novermber 2008 and will include updates of all current findings. The second version of the deliverables will therefore reflect the further analysis carried out by the Consortium as well as take into account comments made by the project’s Peer Review Group and the European Commission.

All deliverables are available on the publications/public deliverables section of our project website: www.european-eparticipation.eu.

For further and related information please visit www.european-eparticipation.eu or the eParticipation and eDemocracy Network www.epractice.eu/community/eparticipation.

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

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

First wave of eParticipation Study deliverables available online 1. July 2008 – 15:37 by Danish Technological Institute

As you may already be aware the European Commission (DG Information Society and Media) funded eParticipation Study – titled “Study and supply of services on the development of eParticipation in the EU” – is currently underway and in this connection the first wave of deliverable has now been prepared and submitted to the EC and a group of external peer reviewer (see www.european-eparticipation.eu for further details).  

Deliverables include:

• Major factors shaping the development of eParticipation (D1.1a)
• Key actors in the EU in the field of eParticipation (D1.2a)
• Main benefits of the eParticipation developments in the EU (D1.3a)
• Mapping the state of play in eParticipation in the EU (D1.4a)
• First post-workshop report (D3.1b)
• Framework for eParticipation good practice (D4.1a)
• First newsletter (D6.3a)

 In addition the following deliverables will be available end of July:

• eParticipation good practice cases (D4.2a)
• eParticipation recommendations (D5.1a)

This first wave of deliverables will be updated for the next deliverables wave expected in October/November 2008. The second version of each deliverable will take into account comments by the European Commission and the project’s peer review group as well as further work conducted by the Consortium Partners in the intervening period.

You may view all deliverables in the publications/public deliverables section on www.european-eparticipation.eu or directly on https://195.251.218.37/eP//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=2

Please note that we are continuously looking for people with involvement or experience in eParticipation at the European level who will be able to guide use to relevant eParticipation initiatives, projects, events, etc. We are especially interested in examples at the European level, that may be considered as good practice, or from which lessons can be learned.

If you have not already done so, you may wish to register for the eParticipation and eDemocracy Network on https://www.epractice.eu/community/eParticipation.

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

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