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.
8. September 2010 – 12:05 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
On September 30st and October 1st Berlin will be the place to be for public servants, academics and all sorts of people active in the field of Government 2.0. After the very successful first Gov2.0 Camp last year the idea of an unconference aimed at bringing together Social Media experts and activists with public administration representatives has made its mark on Germany and consequently let to the organisation of the Government 2.0 Camp 2010.
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:
2. September 2010 – 17:00 by Centre for E-Government
The sub-catagories of the ePart 2010 (dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy) were foundations, eParticipation initiatives, understanding & evaluation and ICT & eVoting. The conference was colocated with and held in parallel tracks to the EGOV 2010.
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.
2. September 2010 – 14:20 by Centre for E-Government
From August 29 to September 2 both the EGOV 2010 and ePart 2010 conferences (the ninth conference of the IFIP WG 8.5 group) took part in Lausanne, Mouline – a rather rural but overally nice area (one was literally facing cows when getting off the metro). This year the conferences were hosted at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration – IDHEAP. Some minutes of the keynotes and selected presentations of the first two days.
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.
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.
Our “EVOTE” Conferences have become an international meeting point for e-voting experts worldwide. This year’s “EVOTE2010″ will be the fourth of it’s kind.
Today, June 15, the reduced early registration fee ends! (300€ including social events)
From June 16 the price will be 360€.
In order to get the discounted fee, register online today!
The 4. International Conference on Electronic Voting will be held from July 21 to 24 of 2010 in Bregenz, Austria. Please have a look at our internationally casted conference programme here.
We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference in July – so register now!
Please register at the Conference Website. Please indicate ‘special status’ as “PEP-NET Member” to profit from full discount when registering at the website.
PEP-NET Meeting
Please do not forget to register for the PEP-NET Meeting in Krems, Austria.
Today, on Friday 26th of February, the extended deadline for paper submission for the EVOTE2010 conference is due! The last chance to submit you scientific papers and participate in our renowned issue of our fourth issue of the International Conference on E-Voting – EVOTE2010.
The conference will take place from July 21st to July 24th in Bregenz at the beautiful lake Constance.
We are looking forward to another highly international and very interesting event!
In response to the large number of requests from the community, the organizing committee of the 4th Electronic Voting Conference EVOTE2010 decided to extend the deadline for submission of papers by two weeks from Friday February 12 to Friday February 26, 2010.
Please find further information, templates and the call for papers here.
