In the age of ubiquitous participatory culture - from the explosion in user generated media to the very way we do business, art, collaboration and even education - the world of politics often feels left behind, writes Robin Good on his blog.

“Democracy has become indirect, stale and something far removed from the daily lives of everyday people. But this is changing.”

“Participatory democracy is high on the agenda of the European Citizens’ Initiative (or ECI) who are launching their campaign today in the European Parliament in Brussels. The aim of this ambitious campaign is to empower citizens to propose concrete policy and legal changes to the European Commission, by exercising the right of initiative.”

“With hundreds of organizations behind them, and volunteers in their thousands, the ECI are determined to show that collective action can have a direct impact on the way we live our lives as active producers, rather than passive consumers of democracy.”

“Bringing power to the people that are effected directly by legislation is a bold and necessary measure in an age when accountability is often swept under the carpet, and politicians increasingly fail to represent the interests of those that elected them once the final votes are cast.”

“By attempting to gather one million signatures, the ECI campaign aims to gain the right of initiative, so that European citizens and civil society organizations could then directly influence the political agenda of the EU for the first time in history. With one million citizens collective voices, it is possible to demand changes to European law and policy, placing the right to challenge the actions of politicians firmly in the hands of the people at street level.”

In this exclusive video interview with the ECI’s Carsten Berg, and former rector of the College of Europe and supporter of the cause Gabriel Fragniere, Robin Gold “talks through the key questions about what the ECI aims to achieve, how it can be done, and what you can do to make a difference in the emerging participatory democracy that promises to tip power in favor of everyday people.”

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Designing for civil society, a blog maintained by British writer and consultant David Wilcox, features some interesting posts lately.

“Making e-democracy part of the everyday - even if that’s YouTube rules” is the title of one of the comments he wrote about the eDemocracy 2006 conference.

The comment spotlights Molly Webb, web manager at Demos who recently won an award for their site; Jo Twist, a senior research fellow at IPPR, where she is heading up their Digital Society and Media programme; and Twist’s colleague Kay Withers, who is working on Emerging Local Media and Citizenship in a Converged Digital Society.

Webb feels that “the main e-democracy focus on politics, government and citizens didn’t fully acknowledge all the activities people engage in online to express their social concerns and aspirations.” “Politics,” she says, “is on the street - outside Whitehall.”

Twist argues that “E-government shouldn’t just take offline processes and digitize them. We should be thinking about how the trends online are opening up new possibilities for communication and collective efficacy.”

Withers raises a similar issue: “As the idea of handing down power from Whitehall to the town hall, to citizens and local communities gains currency, the question which remains unanswered is how digital media and technologies can work more effectively at local levels to represent, enhance, and support real needs, as well as amplify voices and increase participation in decision making.”

The post also contains videos of Webb and Twist.

More articles and videos related to the eDemocracy 2006 conference are linked from this summary page.

The current issue of User Experience, the membership magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association is devoted to user-centred e-government, with five articles on the topic, including one by Experientia partners Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken.

Tom James described how the website of the Salisbury District Council, a UK local authority, changed from a council-centred view to a user-centred view, with the result that the site leapt to the first sport in the SiteMorse survey of UK local authority websites.

Also the Aberdeenshire Council, another UK local authority, implemented a user-centred design approach, write Chris Rourke and Ross Philip. To make sure that government services were highly accessible and usable, the team involved captured user preferences through card sorting, established usability goals and metrics, conducted iterative reviews throughout the design process, and performed usability testing with end users.

Giaele Roccia leads the usability team of CSI-Piemonte, a big semi-public software company that is in charge of most software development for public authorities and entities in the Italian region of Piedmont. In her article she examines how legislative and technological impetus have resulted in strong attention to accessibility compliance, and less strong but growing support of user-centred design techniques in the Piedmont region of Italy. Here as elsewhere, the business case must be made evident to encourage public agencies to apply UCD principles to their websites.

Also written in Piedmont is the contribution by Experientia partners Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken.
The article “Encouraging Participatory Democracy: A Study of 30 Government Websites” starts from the premise that for the first time in history, a wide distribution of technology allows citizens to get involved in public governance and participate in institutional life on a very regular basis. Yet websites of public authorities are barely taking advantage of the power of the participatory citizen.
Two factors play a key role in this gap. First, the average citizen is not well informed about how basic democratic institutions function, which dramatically reduces the citizen’s capacity to influence the democratic process. Websites can help reduce the complexity of public institutions and get people to understand the way institutions and public administrations function and behave. Second, access to public services online is increasingly separated from institutional information. While online service sites are popular, the role of the institutional sites is not clear. The authors argue that these sites can and should take on the role of a two-way communications tool on topics of policy and politics, support knowledge sharing on areas covered by the authority, and create maximum transparency on what the public administration actually does.
To better understand the opportunities, challenges and evolutions that are affecting public institution websites, the authors studied the main sites of 30 public authorities and identified several innovative approaches. A first analysis shows that a lot remains to be improved. Almost all the sites analysed share three characteristics: (1) policy priorities are not concisely communicated and easy to understand, (2) there is only limited innovation in how regional or municipal institutions present themselves; and (3) there are no tools for active participation.
However, some of the studied sites provide elements of innovation that can be used as models and inspirations. The authors conclude that to improve information access, better communication strategies are needed and to increase participation, better usability is of crucial importance.

Jon Armstrong finally argues that e-government needs to do more to ensure citizens’ privacy. After all if government agencies adhere to privacy laws while developing e-Government solutions, then it is likely that their citizenry will increase its reliance on online government resources, safe in the knowledge that serious data protection has been implemented. Armstrong looks at Victoria, an Australian state, as a case-study example. On the website there is also a short interview of Jon Armstrong by Michele Visciola on the issue of privacy and usability.

The magazine also contains Michele Visciola’s review of the book Ambient Findability by Peter Morville.

The peer-reviewed content of User Experience is not available online but printed copies of the magazine can be bought in the UPA Store.

Tony Blair’s outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a “crisis” in the relationship between politicians and voters, writes Brian Wheeler on BBC News Online.

Matthew Taylor - who stressed he was speaking as a “citizen” not a government spokesman - said the web could be “fantastic” for democracy.

But it was too often used to encourage the “shrill discourse of demands” that dominated modern politics.

He was speaking on the day Mr Blair carried out an online interview.

Mr Taylor said Mr Blair’s online grilling from voters - and other initiatives such as environment secretary David Miliband’s blog and Downing Street’s new online petition service - showed the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.

But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to “solve problems” rather than simply abuse politicians or make “incommensurate” demands on them.

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By almost every measure, public confidence and trust in politicians and political institutions is slipping.

The RED unit of the UK Design Council looked at the problem from a local and practical perspective and wanted to find out what MPs could do differently in their constituency to rebuild our democracy and public faith in it.

In this short project they carried out two weeks of user research, ran a design workshop with 15 MPs and spent an intensive week working alongside the constituency office for Doncaster North.

Their report sets out ten practical things every MP can do to rebuild democracy in their constituency.

Download report (pdf, 1.34 mb, 25 pages)

PASC – the UK Public Administration Select Committee - launches a new inquiry into the role that “customers” or “users” should have in shaping or even helping to provide public services.

The establishment of the Parliamentary Ombudsman scheme in 1967, and the introduction of the Citizen’s Charter in 1991 reflected an emerging consensus that public service users have a right to minimum standards, and a right to some recourse when those standards are not met. More recently a number of initiatives aimed at improving public services have put renewed emphasis on the citizen as a ‘customer’, ‘consumer’ or ‘user’ rather than passive recipient of the service.

This inquiry seeks to build on the Committee’s previous report into “Choice, Voice and Public Services” by considering the development of “voice” in the design and delivery of public services: mechanisms for complaint and redress, customer feedback, official consultations, and dedicated user representative bodies. It asks whether users should be more directly involved in service delivery - and if so, how this might be achieved.

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(via eGov Monitor)

An online ideas store to help cultural websites stand out from the crowd has been launched by Culture Online, part of the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), reports the eGov Monitor.

Called ProjectsETC, the new site aims to encourage information-sharing between institutions and focuses on the overlapping areas of education, technology and culture.

The site - www.projectsetc.org - includes case studies, practical guidance and comment pieces about real issues facing the cultural sector in the digital age.

Subjects covered include the truth behind web statistics, search engine optimisation and how to make websites accessible. The new site - part toolkit, part confessional and part advice centre - aims to help professionals working on interactive projects.

A series of podcasts has also been launched, exploring the issues behind the creation and management of digital resources.

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Next week is the 10th anniversary of the birth of e-government in the UK. Michael Cross of The Guardian looks at how it came to be, and asks what progress - if any - has been made.

“In 1996, a green paper called Government Direct (”e” was not yet a business buzzword) set out a vision of citizens paying their taxes, receiving benefits and taking part in the democratic process via new electronic channels.”

“A decade on, after spending several billion pounds building websites, the government is only now getting to grips with many of the challenges the green paper set.”

[...] “For all the talk of radical reform, however, government bureaucracy of 2006 is much the same as it was when the Spice Girls were in the charts. The latest rebranding of the e-revolution, under the name Transformational Government, is wrestling with the same questions raised by Government Direct - how to orient services around the user, how to authenticate citizens’ identities electronically and how to share data in a legal and ethical way. We are no closer to creating a one-stop death notification service for the bereaved.”

Back in 1996, Colin Muid (one of the authors of the 1996 report) says, “We were saying ‘let’s clear up this mess’.” And what about now? “Now? We’ve got a digital interface to that mess.”

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Local and central government looking to offer online services to citizens and businesses will soon be able to access, at no cost, a solution accelerator application offered by Microsoft, and partners PC-WARE AG and Spenta Consulting, through the European Regional Information Society Association (eris@).

The application, known as a digital town hall, makes it possible for small and medium-sized municipalities to offer their citizens access to information and transaction services. It is easily expanded and can be used to create solutions that address citizens’ needs and support back-office operations.

The digital town hall was built by Microsoft independent software vendor (ISV) partners PC-WARE from Germany and Spenta Consulting from Spain and will be the first application available on a new collaborative portal offered by eris@, and based on the Microsoft(R) Solution Sharing Network.

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“Seeking new ways to engage with voters, European politicians have taken to blogging and podcasting to get their messages out,” writes Kerry Capell in Business Week.

“David Cameron, Britain’s Conservative Party leader, launched his own video blog (www.webcameron.org.uk) on Sept. 30.”

“The artfully staged clips—the first one shows Cameron in his kitchen cleaning up after breakfast, explaining that he wants to “clean up” British politics—are drawing a mixed response from voters.”

“A gimmicky ploy to reach voters? No doubt, but Cameron and the growing number of European politicians who are finally following voters into the world of Web 2.0 should be commended for trying to engage the public in a two-sided debate instead of just talking at them.”

“Though still in their early days, new media tools such as blogs, video blogs, and podcasts are fast becoming the 21st century equivalent of stump speeches, allowing politicians to reach a younger, more Web-savvy generation of voters. These tools also help keep the pols in the spotlight—in a way that the pols themselves usually can control. [...] Another big lure of the Net is that it enables politicians to circumvent strict limits on media time.”

Politicians featured: David Cameron (UK), Ulster Unionists (UK), Dominique Strauss-Kahn (France), Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Laurent Fabius (France), Jan Peter Balkenende (Netherlands), Wouter Bos (Netherlands), Jan Marijnissen (Netherlands), etc.

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(via Loïc Le Meur)

(see also the “Participative” democracy and Webcameron posts by Bruno Giussani)

Comhairle, the Irish national agency tasked with supporting the provision of information, advice and advocacy on social services, yesterday unveiled a substantially upgraded version of its information website. The new site, renamed www.citizensinformation.ie, takes the place of the existing e-government initiative known as Oasis as well as Comhairle’s online Citizens Information Database (CID).

The site covers a variety of subjects, including employment rights, buying a home, moving abroad and education. The information is sourced from many different service providers and agencies and is divided into 14 categories so that users can readily access the topic relevant to them.

Each category addresses a series of frequently asked questions on the topic, backed by more in-depth information, supporting documents and downloadable forms. This additional material is just one of the changes that people will notice about the site, said Catherine Hughes, Citizens Information project manager. “There’s more detailed information,” she told siliconrepublic.com. “One of the benefits of Oasis was its simplicity but it was also a drawback. It had a simple structure so you couldn’t add additional documents. Now we can add case studies, work sheets and more detail around the legislation.”

Oasis was originally set up in 2001 and last year clocked up 2.5 million unique visitors. The decision to rename the site was instead prompted by the wish to make a clearer connection between the physical Citizens Information Centres — there are 240 located around the country — and the phone service along with its online equivalent.

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(via E-Government News)

The UK Government launched today the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE), set to drive up eParticipation rates in the UK through providing best practice advice and support to local authorities.

The aim is for seamless, personalised services that respond directly to people’s needs and are delivered in the way that best suits the individual.

ICELE will work with all stakeholders to help ensure local people are well informed and have a real voice in local decision making, as well as spreading this knowledge and learning. Democratic participation is steadily declining, yet opportunities to involve local people in local decision making are growing every day. From text voting through to online consultations, the organisers paln to harness new technologies to make it easy for people across the country to get involved in the democratic process.

The Centre is designed to serve as a ‘virtual’ focal point for collaborative eDemocracy initiatives both in the UK and abroad. Within the UK, local authorities, community groups and citizens can use the Centre’s online resources to help run projects in their local area.

Internationally, governments, academic institutions and not-for-profit organisations can use the Centre’s virtual facilities as a first point of call for information about pioneering e-democracy initiatives.

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A new social-networking Web site, aimed at “opinion leaders” in politics and other issues, will launch Thursday with a roster of members including former U.S. President Bill Clinton, U.S. senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, writes Grant Gross of IDG News Service in MacWorld.

Hotsoup.com aims to give an online voice to the millions of U.S. residents who keep up with the news and influence the opinions of their friends, family and coworkers. The founders of Hotsoup.com, including Internet entrepreneurs and Republican and Democratic consultants, hope the site will contain information that’s “not filtered, not spun,” said co-founder Ron Fournier, a former chief political reporter for the Associated Press.

The goal is to create smart, civil debate, said three of the site’s co-founders during a preview Wednesday. “Americans are tired of yelling at their TV screens,” said Allie Savarino, a Hotsoup co-founder who also helped start the Sisterwoman.com social-networking site. “They want a voice of their own, and they want someone to listen.”

Hotsoup will include video- and text-based commentary from top political, entertainment and sports figures, and it will allow users to start their own discussions about issues important to them. Like other social-networking sites, Hotsoup also will allow users to create detailed profiles.

Hotsoup will also poll users for their opinions on issues and ask them how likely they are to tell friends about a particular debate they’ve participated in on the site.

The concept has drawn significant interest, even before the site’s official launch. Since July, 22,000 people have preregistered for the site, Savarino said. Members include cyclist Lance Armstrong, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and politically active rock musician Jon Bon Jovi.

Hotsoup’s founders said they hope the interaction between their opinion-leader members can influence public policy. “Our nation’s public, business and religious leaders are realizing they need to listen and engage with this community,” Savarino said.

Asked if they’re concerned that the debate on Hotsoup will devolve into something less than civil, the co-founders said editor-in-chief Fournier will attempt to steer discussions that get off track, although they don’t want to cut off debate.

With Europe’s population ageing rapidly and the demand for healthcare growing, healthcare services need to become more efficient. However, little hard evidence is available on the contribution of eHealth solutions. Now one EU project, eHealth Impact, has demonstrated that eHealth can provide enormous benefits – if the technology is properly implemented.

Electronically enhanced healthcare promises to reduce costs, improve quality and efficiency and treat more patients with the same resources. However, to date, no reliable data has been available to support this claim.

Now that data exists. The eHealth Impact project, which finished in May 2006, conclusively demonstrated that there is over a 2:1 ratio between economic benefits and costs. In other words, the benefits gained from implementing eHealth systems are more than two times greater than the additional cost of implementing them. “An eHealth system might cost more, but the benefits far outweigh the costs,” says Alexander Dobrev of the project team.

“But that ratio needs to be treated with caution,” he warns. “This is the cumulative average from ten of the best eHealth implementations we could find in Europe.”

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Over the summer the RED unit of the UK Design Council ran a short design project to reconnect politicians with voters.

“We did not concentrate on the high road to democratic reform: Lords Reform, Electoral reform, devolution, or constitutional reform. But, focused instead on the low road to democratic renewal. We looked at how voters experience their local constituency MP.”

“We did 3 things. Firstly, we talked to the public to get a better understanding of the problem. We ran a design workshop for 15 MPs and their staff to get them to put themselves in the shoes of the public. And finally we developed some prototyped practical solutions working for a week in an MP’s constituency office in Doncaster.”

“We viewed MPs as a provider of a service to a local community, and tried to develop a new ’service offering’ for them. This included some familiar and unfamiliar ideas. The familiar ideas, included services like newsletters websites and surgeries. The unfamiliar included group surgeries, street surgeries, clusters, reverse invitations, the new local Hansard and a constitupedia.”

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Lavorare meglio, conciliare vita privata e professione: con l’aiuto delle tecnologie digitali.
PA@lfemminile è uno spazio per conoscere, comunicare, condividere. Dedicato alle donne della Pubblica Amministrazione.

Working better, reconciling private and professional life, with the help of digital technologies. PA@lfemminile (”Public Service in a female way”) is a space to be informed, communicate and share. Dedicated to the women in public service.

The site is run by Roberta Cocco, Director of Marketing of Microsoft Italy, who is also the driving force behind Futuro@lfemminile (the future in a female way) which aims to teach women about technology and empower them via technology.

(via a thousand tomorrows)

Patient Opinion is all about enabling (UK) patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

Patient Opinion is a revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.

Funded jointly by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, Patient Opinion is a new non-profit company led by experienced GP and social entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Hodgkin. Based on his experience, and the service improvement requirements of the NHS, Dr. Hodgkin identified two major communication gaps which Patient Opinion will address:

• Patients and carers are now being provided with greater choice of specialist treatment options and locations - but they have little information on which options are best for them, without which choosing can be a lottery.
   
• The NHS has put in place lots of reporting and rating systems - but this formal ‘performance’ data seldom records the real experience of patients and carers.

People & Participation is the first publication of Involve, an independent organisation focused on the practicalities of giving more power to ordinary people.

“There have been many books and pamphlets about democratic reform. What is unusual about this publication is that it provides much needed practical detail, drawing on the experiences of many hundreds of practitioners who have used new methods to involve the public in issues ranging from local planning to nanotechnology. Its starting point is that deepening and strengthening democracy depends on success in learning lessons about why some kinds of participation lead to better and more legitimate decisions, while others do not.”

“The book shows that greater public involvement can greatly help in addressing some of our most pressing problems, and countering the risks of distrust and alienation. But it also warns that too much participation today is superficial, an exercise in ticking boxes as opposed to good democratic governance, or using public consultation to justify decisions that have already been made.”

“To their credit hundreds of public agencies have taken the lead in trying to involve the public more actively. The priority now is to build on that experience and to build confidence that public involvement can lead to better, and more legitimate, decisions.”

To download a free copy click here.

Falling voter numbers in elections across the European continent suggest people are increasingly disenchanted with the political process. Could an enhanced webcasting system, tested by local authorities in four countries, solve this ‘democratic deficit’ and help to bind communities together?

Martine Ruzza certainly thinks so. A member of the eParticipate project, part of the eTEN programme facilitating e-services for European Union citizens, she highlights the praise heaped on its system, and the resulting webcasts, by participants at the June 2006 ‘ICT for an inclusive society’ conference in Riga, Latvia. This event also generated a groundbreaking declaration on e-democracy.

“One-way internet portals are no longer good enough,” says Ruzza. “People want two-way communication with their local authorities, so they can consult documents, provide feedback and so on. Our system addresses all these requirements.”

The project, which ended in September 2006, builds on an open and interactive video platform developed by the UK company Public-i. Though based on webcasting, this platform offers far more than the streaming of sound and vision over the internet. Its main feature is ‘contextualisation’ – providing additional information on the speakers filmed at events. So a webcast may include textual details on their name and function, plus a biography, photos and email address.

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eUser, a Europe-wide survey of citizen needs for eGovernment and other public online services, funded by the EU, finds that 55% of those who have used eGovernment services are positive. Early efforts by Member States have led to a good start.

Nevertheless, a considerable proportion (33%) of users experience at least one significant obstacle when using or trying to use online government services. These include locating the relevant online service in the first place; using eGovernment efficiently; dealing with poor or patchy quality of content; and limitations in service functionality.

To remedy this situation, European governments must intervene on both the supply side - tailoring services to user needs and the user side - developing eSkills and awareness of online advantages.

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