Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker, a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is part of a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

Games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. Video games also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective.

Featured games:

• Peacemaker (a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)
• Food Force (a UN released game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones)
• A Force More Powerful (a game to teach the methods of influencing or changing the political environment using nonviolent methods)
• Darfur is Dying (a narrative based simulation about surviving in a Darfur refugee camp)
• September 12 (a simple game to explore some aspects of the war on terror
• Madrid (a newsgame about the 3/11 terrorist attacks in Spain)

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“Extreme democracy” is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues.

Visit website

We want to start a new political party that will focus on formulating political agendas rather than fielding candidates for election. The Participatory Democracy Party (PDP) will be a genuine grass roots effort; the party membership, organized into task forces focused on particular areas of concern, will identify problems that the political system can address, evaluate proposed solutions, and define a political agenda to apply the best solutions to the problems. The party’s influence on events, then, will depend on its ability to get elected officials to adopt and implement the agendas it develops. The work of the party task forces will be done through email and telephone conferences, managed and facilitated by web-based technologies. The PDP will be a transparent effort: all party communications will be publicly archived.

This site presents a proposed structure and operational methodology for establishing the PDP.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has recently announced Campaigns Wikia, an effort to bring political discourse to the masses using the humble wiki as the platform.

“Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.”

“[It is] a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.”

“This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.”

“Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.”

- Read Campaigns Wikia mission statement
- Read background article

The conference “Towards e-Democracy: Participation, Deliberation, Communities“ (in short, TED06) will take place from 24 to 26 October in Mantova, Italy.

For the past four years the European Science Foundation programme Towards Electronic Democracy (TED) has focused on the development of methods to address societal issues via the WWW and favour e-participation using the methodologies of modern decision analysis and support to involve citizens and stakeholders in the actual process of decision making: a true step towards e-democracy rather than the e-administration techniques that, by and large, have been emphasised by e-government initiatives. At TED’s heart is a vision to develop methodologies which enable multiple decision analyses to be communicated, explored and, indeed, built over the WWW, thus providing the mechanism by which stakeholders may be drawn more closely into the decision making process.

This conference occurs at the end of TED’s funding cycle and aims both to reflect on progress over the project and to set future research agendas.

The conference will be hosted by the University of Mantova and will be kindly sponsored by the Township of Mantova.

This focus area of Carnegie Mellon’s InSITeS (Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society) embraces the topics commonly referred to e-government and electronic democracy.

“Although the phenomena overlap, e-government generally refers to IT-enabled service delivery, procurement, and internal government management. Electronic democracy generally pertains to the use of new information technology to facilitate political engagement by the people, whether communicating with official government organs or among themselves.”

“We are concerned with discovering the circumstances under which people are most likely to resort to the Internet as a significant medium for meaningful community engagement, and with developing tools to help citizens identify, discuss, and resolve issues of public policy.”

A few progressive [public authorities in the USA], such as VA’s Memorial Affairs, have taken a step beyond early e-gov programs, using the Web as a platform for delivering interactive services, aka Web 2.0. These new services, or Web applications, make better use of an agency’s data and other resources, including human resources, by creating bridges from public-facing Web sites to back-end databases. And increasingly, thanks to a slew of new open-source and commercially available tools, government Web applications can be as rich as software run on a PC.

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L’economia partecipata è un tema affascinante che deve diventare strumento di politica attiva capace di mettere al centro i diritti dei cittadini. È anche un lungo percorso che richiede prudenza, radicalità, motivazione, entusiasmo.

Un’economia partecipata è un’economia che tiene conto di diritti e bisogni: senza partecipazione non vi è democrazia.

E’ online la nuova versione del sito dell’Economia Partecipata con tantissime novità sulle modalità di partecipazione via internet ai documenti economici della Regione Lazio.

E’ infatti possibile partecipare attraverso un forum, una grande assemblea virtuale, per farlo occorre registrarsi.

Translation:

The participative economy is a fascinating theme that should become an active policy tool to put the rights of the citizen at the centre of policy making. Full participation also is a long journey that requires carefulness, courage, motivation and enthousiasm.

A participative economy is an economy that takes the rights and the needs of people into account: without participation there is no democracy in the economical process.

The new version of the Participative Economy website is online. It contains many new tools for people to participate online in the economic documents of the Lazio Region.

People can participate through a forum which functions like a virtual meeting hall. You only need to register.

Kitchen Cabinet is a project initiated by the UK Design Council to design and prototype new systems of interaction between (UK) MPs and constituents and to create an open resource of ideas, suggestions and best practises that MPs can use to strengthen the connection between people and politicians.

Kitchen Cabinet starts with the constituent’s perspective. The Design Council has been “listening to the perceptions and experiences of constituents in North East and South East England” and they are “in the process of identifying a number of design opportunities that MPs can use to improve their relationship with local voters”.

The findings from this initial stage of research with constituents can be downloaded here:

• Download project summary presentation (pdf, 964 kb, 11 pages)
• Download complete user research report (pdf, 1.71 mb, 107 pages)
• Download user research summary film (mp4 file, 55 mb, 10 min.)

The digital strategy all but ignores older people says David Sinclair from the UK advocacy group Help the Aged and urges the government to correct this through specific targeted programmes for the population over 65 in UK.

Technology offers massive potential for tackling the problems faced by too many older people. It can help deliver better and more focussed services including those which help tackle isolation; poverty; and exclusion; whilst at the same time play a part in helping improve the health of older people.

However, whilst the potential of technology is enormous – it is limited by a large number of factors – imagination; the digital divide; age discrimination; inaccessible services; the lack of support to help older people use technology; the lack of awareness of older people’s issues by service providers and, most fundamentally a lack of involvement by older people in the design of e-services.

As a result, we as a society are missing the real opportunity which technology offers and as a result, older people are becoming more rather than less excluded as a result of the way technology is changing our lives and the public services we rely on. A survey we conducted last year revealed that more than 3 million older people (36 per cent) feel out of touch with the fast pace of modern life.

Only around one in five over 65s have ever used the internet. Most of concern is that the figures for over 65s has not increased over the past 3 years. The most recent figures actually show a fall. This highlights two issues – firstly that the market alone is not and will not deliver internet access for older people and secondly, that we cant just ignore this issue and hope it eventually solve itself. If we look at most other modern media technologies we see a similar pattern of usage – ie it declines with age.

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L’administration numérique au service du citoyen et des collectivités.

E-administration est une initiative du centre de compétences wallon Technofutur 3 - Aéropole.


Online government at the service of the citizen and local public entities.

E-administration is an initiative by the Walloon competence centre Technofutur 3 - Aéropole.

Prévu pour fin 2007, mon.service-public.fr devrait proposer un portail personnalisé pour les usagers intégrant tous les contenus de Service-Public.fr et un accès simplifié aux téléservices. Ce nouveau portail devrait également disposer d’un coffre-fort de données personnelles permettant de stocker des documents administratifs en format électronique, de manière à accomplir les démarches en ligne plus facilement.

Entre avril et juillet 2006, 500 expérimentateurs testeront le portail Mon.Service-Public.fr. Cette expérimentation est destinée à vérifier l’adéquation du portail avec les besoins des usagers. Ce dispositif encore expérimental permet à l’usager d’accéder à un ensemble de services mis en place par un nombre encore limité d’organismes : CNAF, ANPE, Documentation française/service-public.fr, et Éducation Nationale. Pionniers de l’administration en ligne, les expérimentateurs recevront une carte à puce “mon.service-public.fr” ainsi qu’un lecteur de carte afin de tester ce nouveau moyen d’identification. Ils utiliseront la version provisoire du portail et feront part de leurs remarques aux responsables de l’expérimentation. Les résultats de cette expérimentation seront analysés puis une synthèse sera rédigée et communiquée en juillet 2006.

Translation:

At the end of 2007 2007, mon.service-public.fr will be the address of a personalised portal where users can integrate all the contents of Service-Public.fr with a simplified access to online services. The new portal will also contain a virtual personal briefcase where users can store administrative documents in electronic version, thus allowing them to handle their online tasks more easily.

Between April and July 2006, 500 users tested the Mon.Service-Public.fr portal, which allowed us to verify if the portal was adequately addressing the needs of the users. The prototype version of the portal allows users to access a range of services provided by a still limited number of entities, including CNAF, ANPE, Documentation française/service-public.fr, and Éducation Nationale. As e-gov pioneers, the test users received an electronic card “mon.service-public.fr” as well as a reader to test this new identification card. After submitting their remarks to the project leaders, we expect that a synthesis of the results will be available in July 2006.

Adèle vous présente les services en ligne qui vous permettent d’effectuer vos démarches administratives tout simplement depuis votre domicile.

Adèle presents you its range of online services, allowing you to manage your administrative tasks and procedures directly from home.

Démocratie 2.0 - La prochaine révolution sur internet sera politique…

Démocratie 2.0 - The next internet revolution will be political…

Government 2.0: Using Technology to Improve Education, Cut Red Tape, Reduce Gridlock, and Enhance Democracy
by William D. Eggers.

A well-written, lively, optimistic book that calls for the transformation of technology in government from lipstick on a bulldog to total information awareness. This book is proactive in nature (see what these governments are really doing), does not call for a wholesale and costly transformation, and employs a subtle shaming of those governments that have not yet joined the 21st century. William Eggers’s argument, conservative in nature, states that the world of politics would quickly and markedly benefit from this digital transformation in terms of a fiscal payoff, but a more profound change would result as governments become more transparent, more democratic, and more efficient.

- Amazon link
- Book website
- Article by the book author

This blog is designed by James Scott, Associate Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri-Columbiato, to support his research and teaching on the use of the web in government and politics, in civic engagement and public involvement in local and regional governance.

Recently, reports FutureLab, Motorola created a new community edited “user manual” for its new Q Phone. Essentially Motorola has set up a wiki, using the same software as wikipedia, that anyone can edit to serve as the new phones user manual.

Because the possible applications for the Q will always expand, the “ideal” user guide would also be able to grow and change. This wiki is an attempt to do that. It’s a place to capture and share the knowledge of the greater community of Q users. If, for example, you have added a new application to your Q, you could post instructions on how you did it here, for the benefit of all Q users.

Again, only a tiny percentage of the customer base will actually contribute to this wiki, but it will provide a huge amount if value to the larger community.

What if a public authority did the same for how to best interact with public services? Citizens would write from their perspective, rather than from an institutional perspective, and could help guide other citizens within a system which is sometime difficult to navigate initally?

“Citizen, Content, Connect”, is the title of a recent report from the URBACT Information Society Network, that presents an innovative way to look at the role of ICT in addressing social exclusion and highlights the work of InfoBank, a successful project in Finland.

The report stresses that the provision of compelling content is critical when it comes to combatting the digital divide and social exclusion.

- Read full article (eGov Monitor)
- Download report (pdf, 3.6 mb, 62 pages)
- Executive summary in Italian (pdf, 248 kb, 11 pages)

CityCita is a free service that lets people join or create local groups and organise meetings, all within an open classification system. The service offers a convenient way to connect with others who share similar interests and ideas and live locally. There are thousands of groups that people can join in an easy-to-use, privacy-protected and spam-protected environment. The CityCita service can be accessed via its web site or through any email program.

The non-profit service is specifically designed for associations, social groups, political groups, alumni groups, membership groups, conferences and events, and has been developed by a Paris and London based company.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the TED (Towards Electronic Democracy) Conference on E-Government, TCGOV 2005, held in Bolzano, Italy in March 2005.

The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-democracy: improving citizen participation and policy making, e-democracy: experiences from different countires, political and societal implications, security for e-government services, semantic Web technologies, architectures for government application integration, case studies for government application integration, decision support systems, managerial and financial aspects of e-government projects, and e-procurement.

(By clicking on “Online version available” you can download all the text or individual chapters for free.)