The e-Governance Academy is an Estonian non-governmental, non-profit organisation, founded for the creation and transfer of knowledge concerning e-governance, e-democracy and the development of civil society.

Its mission is to train and advise leaders and stakeholders in using information and communication technology (ICT) to increase government efficiency and to improve democratic processes with the aim of building open information societies.

The e-Government Academy is a joint initiative of the Government of Estonia, the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Regional Support Centre of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Participation Works is an online gateway to the world of children and young people’s participation.

The gateway provides a single access point to comprehensive information on policy, practice, networks, training and innovative ideas from across the UK and improves the way practitioners, organisations, policy makers and young people access and share information about involving children and young people in decision making.

The Being Heard website has been designed by the UK Hansard Society with the aim of inviting young people to engage with political issues and political decision-makers.

The aim of Being Heard is to build young people’s level of political awareness and participation so that they can play an active role in the democratic processes affecting their lives.

Being Heard is also a consultation space for decision-makers to engage with young people and their ideas, experiences and opinions.

Australian eDemocracy, a clearing house for information about the topic, is a collaboration between a number of Australian organisations involved in using Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to bring governments and citizens closer together with each other.

Partners include The National Forum (an NGO promoting democratic uses of the Internet in Australia), Cisco Systems and the Queensland University of Technology.

It features regular posts with information relevant to Australian eDemocracy, including overseas intitiatives and developments. The site is run on the basis of a wiki with contributions being provided by sponsoring organisations.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, now contains pages on e-democracy in English, Hebrew, German, Italian and Portuguese.

The English page is by far the most exhaustive.

The e-DC is o­ne of the first interdisciplinary research centres dedicated to the study of e-democracy.

Its main goal is to improve our understanding of how new information and communication technologies are interacting with our institutions of democratic governance, and to study the outcomes that are being produced as a result of this interaction. To attain this goal the e-DC research team strives to pursue interdisciplinary research of the highest intellectual quality.

From its inception the e-DC has been fortunate in being able to rely o­n the support of three leading research institutes: the Research Centre o­n Direct Democracy (c2d) at the University of Geneva, the European University Institute (EUI) at Florence, and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford.

The institute’s areas of expertise and close connections with the academic and policy communities offer it many opportunities to not o­nly help develop this exciting new field of research, but also to contribute to its practice.

The aim of the eDemocracy.co.nz research project is to examine the impact of using ICT to facilitate and influence the democratic process in a regional community in New Zealand, namely Waitakere City. Its final aim is to develop a framework for eDemocarcy driven by the needs of citizens.

Specifically, this research intends to:

• Observe and document the processes used within a community for engagement, consultation and development between council, community and businesses and the extent to which this is facilitated and influenced by the use of ICT;
• Identify the normative conditions for engagement and electronic engagement that are required in order to establish an emancipatory framework that could lead to a shift in the locus of power within the context of local (and potentially national) governance;
• Define a typology and vocabulary to describe the role of ICT in the processes of democracy, government and governance within the context of the research. This is required to ensure that the study is grounded in a commonly understood and clearly articulated context.

DEMO-net is a Network of Excellence project funded under the European Commission’s sixth framework programme: Information Society Technologies. The project started 1 January 2006, will be funded for 4 years and has a detailed workplan for the first 18 months.

The overarching objective of DEMO-net is to strengthen scientific, technological and social research excellence in eParticipation by integrating the research capacities of individuals and organisations spread across Europe. The intention is to advance the way research is carried out in Europe with respect to quality, efficiency, innovation and impact to overcome the currently fragmented approach to eParticipation in this important European research area. The network with this overall objective will provide a major contribution to the strategic goals set by the European Council.

The project partners are Aalborg University (Denmark); Agentura pro Evropske Projekty a Management (Czech Republic); Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy); Copenhagen Business School (Denmark); County of North Jutland (Denmark); Fondation National des Sciences Politiques (France); Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung (Germany); Institut für Informationsmanagment Bremen GmbH (Germany); Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece); Napier University (UK); Örebro University (Sweden); Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia); University of Bergamo (Italy); University of Helsinki (Finland); University of Iceland (Iceland); University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany); University of Leeds (UK); University of Macedonia (Greece); and Yorkshire and Humber Assembly (UK).

The access2democracy non-profit N.G.O. was established in Athens and New York by a group of prominent, like-minded world citizens aiming to become a leading international civil society organization in the field of e-democracy and to promote the principles and practice of participatory e-democracy within the global arena.

The E-Democracy programme of the Hansard Society, a UK charity that works towards promoting effective parliamentary democracy, seeks to develop innovative ways of using new interactive technologies to reconnect Parliament with citizens and encourage participation in the democratic process.

The E-Democracy Programme’s research explores the potential for interactive technologies to create new channels of communication and participation between Parliament and the people to enable citizens to scrutinise and influence legislation and those who represent them.

Some of their latest initiatives are:

• Citizen Calling - a pilot initiative with the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, where young people can have their say via mobile phone.
• TellParliament.net - open online consultations being run by Parliamentary Select Committees
• im-local.net - an online resource allowing young people and councils to interact and discuss topical local issues using ‘instant messaging’ technology.

Can governments truly boast of services that rival the private sector’s? Leadership in Customer Service: Building the Trust, Accenture’s annual report tracking the evolution of Internet usage and customer service in government, says yes and no.

Accenture interviewed 46 high-ranking government executives in nine countries to assess government services delivery, and concluded that governments using a wide range of technologies and modes of operation are on par with the private sector. Those lacking integrated technologies for robust, online services have a long way to go to reach service delivery matching that of the private sector.

The report also concluded leading governments recognize that true citizen-centricity means removing — through simplification and re-engineering — as much work as possible from the system for citizens.

In addition to improving government services, greater IT automation must also gain the trust of the public, a theme of this report. For e-government to succeed, governments must build trust and comfort with those services, and tap into the public’s preferred modes of communication, whether by telephone or over a network.

• Read full story (Public CIO Magazine)
• Download report (pdf, 8.5 mb, 108 pages)
• Download executive summary in Italian (pdf, 357 kb, 18 pages)

(via eGovernment News)

How can we put the user of public eServices in the center of the designing and delivery of online public services and content?

The EU’s eUSER project wants to stimulate the availability and usage of useful and easy to use online public services.

The focus will be on the needs of citizens as users of online public services in their interactions with public administrations in general, in the management of their health and in furthering their education and developing their skills.

The project will prepare a state-of-the-art resource base on user needs in relation to online public services and on user-oriented methods for meeting these needs. It will then use this resource base to actively support the IST programme, projects, EU policy and the wider European Research Community to better address user needs in the design and delivery of online public services.

The project website already provides some very interesting statistics, country briefs and reports. Incidentally, the project is run in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada.

Read also this feature article, entitled “What users really want from online public services”, published on the IST Results website.

“eParticipation is a Preparatory Action [of the EU's Information Society and Media directorate] to promote the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies in the legislative decision-making processes, in parliamentary and government environments, aiming at enhancing the participation of citizens and contributing to better legislation”.

Is it not clear? Well, unfortunately the rest of the page is not much of a help either. So I had to download the work programme to find out what this eParticipation initiative actually entails (user-friendliness is not the first thought of whoever writes these EU webpages).

It turns out it is all about kicking off some demonstration projects that use technology to create better citizen involvement in the legislative process, or in the EU’s own bureaucratic language:

“The overall objectives are to demonstrate concrete cases where, with the help of modern ICT
tools and applications, improvements of the legislative/legislation process and its outcomes
can be achieved, and at the same time, enhance the participation of the public (citizens,
businesses, socio-economic and political groups, etc) in the decision-making process,
amongst others through improved interaction with decision-makers.”

They have now issued a call for proposal [deadline: 4 October] for trial projects to test state-of-the-art ICT-based tools in concrete legislative processes, with a particular emphasis on:

• Visualisation of arguments, dialogues and impacts of legislation
• Tools to assess costs and benefits of proposed or adopted legislation
• Tools to reduce complexity of legislation in order to improve access to its content by
  non-specialists
• Possible ways to organise and structure legislative information, thus improving use
  and content access, through e.g. standardisation and harmonisation techniques.
• Tools and services to allow access to relevant legislation content according to specific
  needs of citizens, socio-economic groups of geographical areas
• Tools and services to enable the interaction between members of parliaments and
  citizens or socio-economic groups on cross-border EU level issues

Asian countries once again dominate e-government ratings, taking three of the top five spots in a global e-government study undertaken by researchers at Brown University. South Korea, ranked 86th last year, earned the top rank, followed by Taiwan, Singapore, the United States and Canada. The study shows that 29 percent of government agencies around the world are offering online services, compared to 19 percent in 2005.

The sixth annual survey conducted by Darrell M. West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American institutions at Brown University, and a team of researchers evaluated online government Web sites of 198 countries around the globe. The researchers evaluated government Web sites based on two dozen criteria, including disability access, existence of publications and databases, presence of privacy and security policies, contact information, and the number of online services. The Taubman Center released previous studies of global e-government in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005.

This year’s study reviewed 1,782 government Web sites in 198 countries during June and July 2006. A variety of different sites were analyzed, including executive, legislative and judicial offices as well as such departments and ministries of the government as health, education, foreign affairs, interior, finance, natural resources, foreign investment, transportation, military, tourism and telecommunication.

Researchers found that 94 percent of Web sites have online publications and 72 percent have links to databases. Only 26 percent (up from 18 percent in 2005) show privacy policies and 14 percent present security policies (up from 10 percent in 2005). Software provided by the company Watchfire Inc. assesses whether websites provide assistance for the vision- or hearing-impaired. According to this software, government Web sites are still lagging on disability access. Only 23 percent of sites provide disability access, although this is up from 19 percent in 2005.

Read full story

(via E-Government News and Public CIO)

During 2005-2006, The Annenberg Center for Communication at The University of Southern California sponsored a research group on “Networked Publics.”

netPublics explores the roles of audiences, activists, citizens, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. These changes include but are not limited to the changing relationship between production and consumption, viral and peer-to-peer distribution, and networked lateral political mobilisation. Although the Internet is clearly a central player, the projects considers media forms both old and new as part of a much broader media ecology undergoing profound social, technical and cultural transformation.

One of the project themes is digital democracy, i.e. the use of digital communication technologies to enhance the democratic process by, among other things, making the process more accessible, increasing and enhancing citizen participation in public policy decision making, and increasing government transparency and accountability.

An interesting article on the site is by Mark E. Kahn where he questions whether the internet has brought more or less democracy. An excerpt:

In recent years, we have seen a broad disenchantment among people with civic engagement and representative democracy. [...]

Theorists and advocates of digital democracy exhibited a tendency to view civic volunteers, amateur participants, and populist majorities as uninformed, impulsive, and materialisticevidenced in part by their preference for Internet pornography and commerce over online civic and political engagement. Even progressive promoters of digital democracy demonstrated distrust for the people and for digital engagement, participation, and populism.

Increasingly, digital democrats draw on recent political theories of deliberative democracy to prioritize rule-bound rationality a preferred means to tame public passions and articulate, educate, and improve public opinion. This priority gives rise to a very modest effort to achieve more democracy. Ideally, netizens online, disciplined deliberations will produce sober, wise recommendations for policy-maker and law-maker consideration. In effect, deliberation will make the demos safe for democracy.

This priority is problematic for two reasons. One involves what works well on the Internet. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, news groups, listserves, blogs, and wikkies afford users considerable opportunity for talk, but that online talk tends to be undisciplined, intolerant, and superficial rather than deliberative. Furthermore, publicly sponsored web sites rarely take advantage of the Internets interactive possibilities. There is good reason to believe that the disciplined, facilitated discussions sought by deliberative democrats is more suited to the halls of Ivy League universities than to disembodied talk among transient surfers on the Web. By contrast, the undisciplined talk of the coffee house, collaborative participation in mobilizations, and tapping public opinion by way of polling and plebiscites seem well suited to Internet technology.

The other problem is that prioritizing deliberation produces exclusionary tendencies. Individuals and groups that do not adhere to high standards of deliberation may be excluded or at least unwelcome by the moderators of online deliberative venues. Who are the unwelcome? In the U.S., they turn out to be fairly significant percentage and identifiable segment of the public.

Lately there is a growing trend within governments and public authorities to separate citizen-focused online services from institutional communications, similar to e.g. how a telecom provider separates its customers services from its corporate information.

Here are some of the best examples of governmental service websites we know of. Sites are in English except where indicated.

• Austria: help.gov.at
• Belgium: Vlaanderen.be (in Dutch)
• Canada: Seniors’ Info, Service Alberta, Service Ontario
• Denmark: Danmark.dk (in Danish)
• Finland: Suomi.fi
• France: Service-Public (in French)
• Ireland: Citizens Information
• Netherlands: Overheid.nl (in Dutch)
• Norway: Norway.no
• Portugal: Portal do Cidadão
• Singapore: eCitizen | My.eCitizen
• South-Korea: G4C (Government for Citizens)
• Spain: 060 (national, in Spanish), GenCat Serveis (Catalunya)
• Sweden: Sverige.se (in Swedish)
• UK: Directgov
• USA: FirstGov.gov

The province of Parma, in Italy, has launched a new project – the Pa.i.S (Partecipa il Sociale) plan – aimed at bringing the region’s public institutions closer to the daily lives of its citizens. Pa.i.S is co-financed by the Ministry for Innovation and Technology (MIT) and the National Centre for Informatics in Public Administration (CNIPA), as part of the ‘eDemocracy in the regions and local agencies’ action plan.

The Pa.i.S plan, run by the Health and Social Policy Directorate of the Province, has three main action lines aimed at providing the local authorities in the Province with concrete tools for developing alternative approaches to local administration which promote greater public participation.

These will include:

• the reinforcement and extension of the Sociale.Parma web portal, encouraging an evolution towards more active public participation;
• the Provincial Observatory of Social Policy (OPP-P); and
• the Laboratory of Participative Democracy (LAB).

These three actions are closely interlinked and based on a common theme – young people. The portal will include a forum, newsletter and various services aimed at nurturing greater public involvement in social policy. The Observatory will use new ICT tools to monitor public opinion on social policy with the objective of bringing it closer to the real needs of the people.

Finally, the ‘Laboratory’ will carry out experiments in participative democracy in three of the region’s local authorities (Fidenza, Colorno and Collecchio) using both traditional means and electronic tools. Each commune will, for example, select issues on which citizens will be invited to comment through an experimental eVote portal.

eGovernment News (20 February 2006)

“Leveraging Web 2.0 in governments” is the first project of Government 2.0 Think Tank, or “G2TT”, an outlet of participation for those who are passionate about Public Service and want to solve problems in their fields. The project is described as follows:

Throughout the world, governments are facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges in how they manage information. For example, the commoditization of Information Technology ("IT"), coupled with Web 2.0 trends and technologies, present a basket of solutions often leveraging Open Source Software and Open Standards. The Information Technology ("IT") landscape is dramatically changing, at a pace that few governments and large corporations are able to keep up with.

While these fundamental changes are occuring on the IT front, the traditional governmental silos of Information Management, such as Records Management, Library Management, Archives, Metadata & Taxonomy, Access to Information & Privacy, etc. are breaking down to make room for an increasingly unified version of information management, reconciled and working with IT.

These major transformational currents will completely reshape the way governments operate and interact with the Public they serve. How these changes will occur, however, is difficult to predict, because few governments entrust the full spectrum of responsibilities related to Integrated Information Management to a single Chief Information Officer (CIO's). Current CIO's are often "Chief IT Officers" as opposed to "Chief Information Officers".

Many public servants possess the necessary knowledge to empower their governments to embrace these major trends. However, they are typically responsible for only one piece of the problem. This is where G2TT comes in.

This is the first association project, seeking to bring Public Servants and any other interested parties to work on a common goal, leveraging open source community spirit: Leveraging Web 2.0 in governments. This project, similarly to other G2TT projects, is designed in accordance with a common set of project principles, in particular, the need to identify a clear, well-articulated deliverable.

The Mobile Democracy blog is dedicated to documenting and exploring political action and mobile media. It is sponsored by the Media 50 Group, a new company aiming to bridge new technology and political action and managed by its co-founder Tim Chambers.

The Serious Games Initiative is focused “on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.”

The website, which is really a blog, was developed by David Rejeski, director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consultancy.

On the Wilson Centre website — which strangely enough doesn’t provide a link back to the Serious Games Initiative website — you can read an interesting article by David Rejeski where he argues that there should be a public sector body to make video games in the same way that PBS or the BBC makes radio and television. This body, which Rejeski calls “Corporation for Public Gaming”, “would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good.” In other words its goal would be “to provide high-quality games, which ‘inform, enlighten and enrich the public.”

Sawyer was also the volunteer producer of the first Serious Games Summit held at the 2004 Game Developers’ Conference. The 2006 Serious Games Summit is “the premier professional conference for the creators and commissioners of serious games, [focused on] the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors”.

(via my business partner Jan-Christoph Zoels and Anne Galloway of Ottawa’s Carleton University)