September 9th, 2009 in Events by Bengt Feil
On September 8th and 9th 2009 the European eParticipation, eDemocracy and eVoting community met in Vienna to discuss the latest developments in the field and to work on potential strategies to move forward. I would like to talk about a few impressions of this event which has been supported by PEP-NET and was one of the events of the PEP-NET Conference Series 2009 which includes the eDem 09, Berlin in October, Future-Democracy 09 and the World e-Democracy Forum.
PEP-NET organized a workshop on “Participatory planning: conflicts, context and cooperation” (Thanks to all speakers and many participants!) on the second day of the conference. Detailed information about the talks and workshops at eDem can be found on the live coverage blog both for Day 1 and Day 2. Some participants did also use Twitter to cover the event. Their posts can be found here.
But now on to a few trends I saw in the talks and discussions:
Technology is just a tool: One of the most repeated (and possibly most true) statements by speakers and participants was that there is a need to drop the “e” in eDemocracy/Participation/Government and shift the focus of research and practical work towards the social and procedural questions. Technology is only a means of organizing processes not the solution to a problem in it self.
It’s about quality not quantity: The sheer number of participants in an online participation process cannot be seen as the most important indicator for success. In many cases the quality of the results is not depended on the number of participants but on how participate with which goal. A few hundred people form heterogeneous social and political background can produce much more sophisticated and balanced recommendations on a political issue than thousands of people who agree on the subject in discussion.
Evaluation of electronic participation processes is very difficult: Several speakers and the workshop led by David Newman tried to identify ways and methods which can be used to judge the success and the performance of eParticipation efforts on a scientific basis. I strongly believe in the necessity of this work but I also think there will not be a tool-set for error-prove evaluation in the near future. This may be one of the reasons why success is still measured in raw number of participants in many cases.
There are leading topics for eParticipation: The discussions and reactions to talks on the event support the point that there are specific groups of topics which lend themselves to eParticipation more than others. Two of them are participation in spatial and urban planning (which is mandatory in many cases and stretches the gap between eGovernment and eParticipation) and participatory budgeting (still a growing trend in Europe). The third group of topics covers internet politics and especially the question of internet filtering and surveillance. Several speakers pointed out that eParticipation projects which did not have the specific goal to address these topics where used by participants to discuss about them. This suggests that governments should try to make use of eParticipation when getting involved with internet politics.
In summary the eDem09 was both a productive gathering of scientists and researchers as well as a possibility to identify some trends in the field. I would be happy about any comments agreeing or disagreeing with my view on the event and the four trends I pointed out.
Edem09, eDemocracy, eParticipation, spatial planning
August 27th, 2009 in Tools, Trends, Visions by Bengt Feil
Real-time or instant communication is one of the major trends of the internet today: Facebook-Chat offers real-time communication, exchanges of thoughts and information happens almost instantly on Twitter, push email on desktop and mobile devices is quickly developing into a standard and instant messaging via standards like Jabber or software like Skype has become an important tools for private and professional communication. eParticipation can benefit from this development as it opens up a door for a new generation of tools and services. But one major component is still missing on the way to the real-time web.
In a nutshell the instant updating is achieved by setting up a hub-server which acts as an intermediate and keeps track of all updates on RSS-feeds and quickly informs all subscribers. A quick introduction to the technical basis is given in the following presentation:
In summary the very simple implementation of this standard would allow all kinds of websites to exchange various sorts of content instantly. It is like changing setting up phone lines between different islands instant of using ships transporting paper mail. Consequently pubsubhubbub (despite having a rather silly name) could be a major building block of the real-time web.
The next generation of eParticipation tools which make use of the real-time web and its underlining technologies could be more distributed and can engage the participants where ever they are on the web without being totally depended on third party platforms like Facebook etc.. One example could be to integrate discussions on Twitter etc. on a given topic to an eParticipation site and to use instant updating RSS to have both discussions linked to one another.
To get more information about this project or to try out what can be done with it I would suggest taking a look at the project page or this short tutorial of how to implement it.
Google, pubsubhubbub, real-time web, RSS, standard
July 23rd, 2009 in Tools, Trends, Visions by Bengt Feil
In May 2009 Google presented the Wave project to the public simply calling it “a personal communication and collaboration tool” at the Google I/O conference. The presentation of the project was 80 minutes long which hints at the fact that Google Wave may be more complex than what it is referred to in the short explanation. Given Googles announcement that Wave will be opened up to a public beta in September and the major buzz this project gets on the internet I will try to sum up what it is about and what the implications may be. If you want to get an in depth overview of Wave please watch the Google I/O presentation embedded below.
https://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ
Google Wave will try to combine all the online communication we know and use into one interface and to organize communication threads by context and topic as opposed to communication tool. The different tools for this new approach to online communication will be familiar (e.g. email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management) but the way the communication threads are organized are different. All communication activities related to one topic is called a Wave. As part of this Wave there can be endless amounts of communication activities (called Wavelets) using different tools with different groups of persons. Wavelets can be real time (e.g. instant messenger), asynchronous (e.g. email) or collaborative (e.g. wiki, shared document) and can include all kinds of media, links and even widgets (like small games etc.). The interesting innovation is that the Google Wave is able to recognize that all of these communication activities belong to a certain Wave which helps to overcome the fragmentation of online communication. Mashable.com made a great graphic to illustrate these concepts.
The Wave software itself is browser based. Therefore users do not need to install additional software and can access their Wave account for any computer. The technical basis for the inner workings of the whole system is the Google Wave Federation Protocol which is based on the open XMPP Standard. This underlining protocol is open to be used by anyone in their software and web services and sets the standards for interoperability between different implementations of the Wave idea and there the Waves and Wavelets themselves. Detailed technical information can be found in several Whitepapers already released by Google.
One thing is very important when looking at a project like this one: Either the Wave idea succeeds completely and rises to be the definite way of online communications or it fails. If it is only adopted by a few onliners it will fragment the web even more as Wave Users will not able to communicate with non-Wave users. Remember the times when you could not send an email from AOL to CompuServe (or even today trying to send a IM from Skype to any other IM service)?
Right now it is not clear if this concept of communication will be able to convince both users and developers and be able to succeed in a world where email is still the dominant online communication tool. But tools like Facebook and Twitter have shown that there are parts of the online population who are interested any willing to learn and use new forms of communication. Furthermore there is a strong feeling among many onliners that email is far from being perfect or mayby completely broken. Taking this into account there may be a window of opportunity for an idea like Wave.
I will revisit this topic when Google Wave is in public beta and try to look at its implications for eDemocracy and eParticipation in a future article. Right now I would like to know what you think: Will the Wave idea be a success?
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Google, Google Wave
