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.

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.

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

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

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.

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. Although it is a great idea to provide discussion forums in all of the languages of the EU member states, I could not easily find the political and programmatic framework in which this project has been started. Thanks to  Simone’s post I learned that “Debate Europe” is just “one part of the ambitious Plan D (D for Discussion, Debate and Democracy)”.

Via Twitter, I became almost at the same time aware of another project funded by the EC called European Citizens Consultations (ECC 2009). This project sounded really interesting to me. Just as “Debate Europe” it provides forums in different languages on different topics, and has additionally a proposal and voting tool. Furthermore, the project aims to achieve concrete results which will be fed into “27 European Citizens’ Consultations” (to be ) attended by a total of 1,500 randomly selected citizens reflecting their country’s demographic composition.” This project is definitely worth another blog post to appear soon.

However, looking for some background information at the website, I understood that “ECC 2009 is co-funded by the European Commission’s “Debate Europe” programme.

Now I got confused: Wasn’t “Debate Europe” the forum project introduced in Simone’s article and the name of the programme “Plan D”?. Seeking for clarification I followed the link on the ECC website promising to provide more information. Unfortunately the respective site does not exist.

No problem, I thought, I will figure that out by visiting some of the different EU ePartcipation sites I have bookmarked. I started with the EU eParicipation Initiative website, which is considered with the eParicipation preparatory action. The third call of this has only recently been closed so there should be actual information on the Commissions’ recent activities available. But, oops, the “address you used is incorrect or obsolete” I was told.

Ok, on with the journey, let’s try some of the other resources. Next I visited the ePartcipation and eDemocracy community at  ePractice.eu portal. No mention of ECC 2009. Maybe something at the European eParticipation portal? No. At DEMO-net? Nothing.

I went back to ePractice.eu and searched for “Debate Europe”. Finally I found a website about “2006 – 2007 Citizen’s Projects – concluding Conference”.  “The purpose of this event” I read “was to draw on the experience gained from the six “Plan D” pan-European citizen’s projects co-funded by the European commission in 2006-7”.
One of these projects is the European Citizen’s Consultations; Debate Europe is not among them (although there is a link to the Debate Europe website). The project description is only concerned with past events, just as if the project has already been completed.

So what can we learn from this?

1. There is definitely a need for a network like PEP-NET trying to provide comprehensive information on eParticipation in Europe.
2. As PEP-NET we have still a long way to go to be recognised as network that must be informed about all Pan European eParticipation projects.
3. We should actively try to make our network better known among the different Units of the European Commission and prospective eParticpation projects.
4. Projects like ECC 2009 should be encouraged by the Commission to send project related information to at least one of the EC funded eParticpation networks or portals.
5. Consistency of EC eParticpation related websites could be improved.

Any other recommendations?

Forums are moderated. Each of the four topic-based forums is introduced by a short summary, accompanied by supporting links and videos as well as by a short poll. Furthermore there is a discussion section for every of the national languages of the 27 Member States. Once registered, the users can participate in all national forums – a possibility a lot of participants use to contribute to the English sub-forum, where they can most easily get into touch with users from other Member States. Some postings are translated into all languages by official EU-translators, predominantly more official news from the Commission rather than opinions stated by civilian participants.

“Debate Europe” is just one part of the ambitious Plan D (D for Discussion, Debate and Democracy, as is mirrored in the forums motto, ), a strategy for a more open and active communication about the political work on the European level, first implemented in 2005 and continued since 2008 : There seems to be a communicational deficit between the EU institutions and its citizens, leading to a decline in trust and confidence in the political system of the EU: While 52 percent of European citizens still give a positive response to being a member of the EU that number is about 6 percent under the percentage from autumn 2007, where 58 percent supported a membership.

Facing these challenges, the European Commission set up means for open and active communication, with “Debate Europe” being the overall motto of the projects. The forum itself is quite plain and simple – the Commission uses a ready-made forum software for its purposes. This offers some advantages: It is easy and cheap to implement and rather easy to use, it is proved to run stable on a lot of servers, there are standard FAQs concerning the most common technical questions and some users will already know how to navigate. But evaluating the results and feeding them into the political process could be rather difficult, especially with a very high number of postings, due to the rather unstructured outline of the discussion.

Moderation guidelines, as posted in the English sub-forum, are quite basic: no hate-speech, no xenophobia, no harassment, no party-propaganda. The moderators keep in the background most of the time, whereas moderator activity differs a bit from one national sub-forum to another: In the Dutch forum the moderators posted initial questions, the moderators of the English forum also raised some questions and posted polls.

There are about 3.376 registered participants – including civilians, moderators, translators and Commissioners as well as spokespersons. Most active discussion topic is the debate about the future of Europe. It is also interesting to take a look at the participation level in the different national forums: The English sub-forum contains the most postings, almost 78.600 in total – this does not come as a surprise, considering that a lot of non-native speakers post their opinion there as well; in the Greek (over 5300 postings) , French (about 3500 postings), Italian (about 1700 postings), and Spanish forums (about 2500), participation and posting frequency are also quite high, while participation to the other national forums is considerably lower. The German forum ranges in the middle, with about 740 postings in total.

“Debate Europe” is one step into the direction of a pan-European dialogue between citizens and members of EU institutions. The figures and the discussions themselves show that there can be raised interest and awareness of European topics by open communication. Yet there still is the challenge to enable a pan-European dialogue regardless of language capabilities, which enables also participants who cannot speak and understand English to discuss with people from other Member States – a task which will require a lot of resources. Another challenge is to raise awareness of the online-forum in the first place: citizens of the different Member States should have the same chances to get to know their possibilities to engage in pan-European discussions. Cooperation with national parliaments and also with national mass media will be needed to reach this aim.

Simone Gerdesmeier (Zebralog Berlin)

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.

To show what concerns are related to this advance by the Council a look closer at the remote search measure is helpful. This measure is aimed at searching computers hard drives over the internet. But a remote search is only useful if the person who is suspected of a crime is not informed about the action. If the suspect would be informed a simple seizure of the computer by police forces would also do the trick. It is unclear how the planned strategy would try to implement such a tool technically but there is a clear threat to the privacy and rights of citizens. How can the investigators be sure that there are no false positives and computers of innocent citizens are searched? Will there be a need for a judge to approve these searches? Will persons whom computers were searches ever be informed about that attack? Could the tools used by the investigators be compromised and also used by criminals?

Besides the rightful doubts about the legality and normative questions related there is another important point: Like with the measures already as part of the Telecom Package, which is series of amendments to existing European Law and contains language which can be seen as a advance to implement deep package inspection and a criminalisation of the Peer-to-Peer infrastructure in Europe, the practicality of a tool like remote search has to be questioned. The rising proliferation of personal routers protecting users from unsolicited connections makes it very hard to do a remote search from a technical stand-point. And even if a tool could pierce the protection provided by a router (which according to security experts is very difficult) it can be assumed that cyber criminals are using tools to protect themselves from being found. For example free and open source encryption software like Truecrypt, which incorporate modern encryption algorithms like AES-256, can be used to secure files easily. Breaking an AES-256 encryption with a reasonably long password might take a few thousands to millions of years even using high-end computers. Maybe ordinary internet users do not use encryption but high-tech criminals surely will and maybe already do.

In Summary it can be asked whether this kind of activities which clearly pose a risk to freedom and privacy and which efficiency is at least very questionable are worth the target at hand. Cybercrime has to be fought there is no doubt about that but the suggested tools at methods do not seem to be actually useful to fight high-tech criminals.

• 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 

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