What are the most democratic countries in Europe? How would we find out? We could look at electoral turnouts. But while elections matter, Demos, the UK think tank, doesn;t believe that democracy is something that should start and finish at the ballot box.

That’s why Demos has developed the Everyday Democracy Index (EDI) [interactive website - pamphlet - project site - presentation].

The EDI is a tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries across many different dimensions. That includes not just formal dimensions of democracy but also more everyday features of democracy – how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family.

The pamphlet sets out the argument and methodology behind the first EDI, which covers 25 countries in the European Union area. Europe is home to some of the world’s oldest democracies as well as some of its youngest. Across many of them the same debates are gathering momentum: Why are people voting less? Why are political party memberships dropping? Why is trust in politics so low?

There are other democracy indices out there, but whilst they may be good at identifying the differences between, say, Belgium and Burkina Faso, they are less good at revealing the contrast between democratic experiences in Finland and France. Starting with Europe, Demos hope to begin a new conversation about democracy where they leave off, with countries around the world.

“We need to connect these debates, we need to invigorate them and we need a new starting point. This is what the Everyday Democracy Index aims to achieve.”

WikiDemocracy is the first experiment in the world to write the parties’ programs bottom-up.

It is still under development and focused on Italy, but we plan to internationalize it as soon as possible. If you wish to cooperate in order to translate some pages, if you want to support with donations, and/or you are a no-profit organization and willing to support us for deployment in other countries.

The UK government is keen for local government to harness technology to revolutionise its services; but a culture change is needed first, says The Guardian newspaper.

The government is providing ever more pilot schemes and opportunities to engage but increasingly fewer people believe that “getting involved” is a good use of their time.

This results in the same people who are already active citizens being offered many more opportunities to engage, whereas the individuals who have not engaged are not benefiting from these new opportunities. So just because new channels of engagement are built, they will not necessarily be used by new participants.

Read full story

The Economist has published a special report on technology and the public sector.

Why is it, they ask, that business succeeds on the web and government mostly fails?

In the leader article, they argue that the three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.

Last week, the UK think tank Demos launched the Everyday Democracy Index (EDI).

The EDI is an original and innovative tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries beyond the ballot box and across many different dimensions. That includes the formal dimensions of democracy, like procedural rights and election turnout. But it also includes more everyday features of democracy – how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family.

The first index covers 25 EU countries.

To see the results and read the pamphlet, visit the interactive website.

Government websites are organization-centric, complicated and confusing, according to a survey of government web professionals in the United States, New Zealand and Canada, writes Gerry McGovern on his blog New Thinking.

Governments are addicted to proving that they are doing their job properly. Many government websites are politics-centric. They talk about the 5-year plans they have just launched, rather than using the website to help implement the 5-year plan.

Too many government websites tell us about what their political masters did. With soft focus pictures we are told that the minister has just arrived down for breakfast. Oh, look, he sat down and is reaching for the toast. I wonder will he have marmalade or honey this morning. (I really care about his diet.)

Too many government websites tell us about the legislation they are enacting. We are victims of a tsunami of policies, procedures and publications in a language that is often meaningless.

Read full story

Involve, a UK-based independent organisation focused on the practicalities of giving more power to ordinary people, just launched a new participation website.

People and Participation.net is a new radical resource to help people across the UK influence Government decision-making. The site combines the strengths of an expert guide to participation with interactivity and inclusiveness of a wiki.

Key features include:

• An interactive tool which helps practitioners to select participatory methods based on their specific circumstances
• A comprehensive methods database, covering over 30 traditional and innovative approaches to public participation from around the world
• A selection of case studies, showcasing good practice and allowing site users to post their own success stories to inspire others
• A section for site users to post their questions about participation. Involve staff will respond to these questions and thereby create an ever growing knowledge bank of answers to common.
• News and events information from the UK and beyond
• A comprehensive library of written and web-based resources from around the world to help site users make sense of public participation

It has been designed by social media specialists Headshift, with funding from a couple of UK Government departments. Involve hopes that the site will be a creative space where officials, councillors and citizens can share their success stories.

New Zealanders have been given the chance to write their own laws, with a new online tool launched by police.

The “wiki” will allow the public to suggest the wording of a new police act, as part of a government review of the current law, written in 1958.

Police say they hope to gain a range of views from the public on the new law before presenting it to parliament.

The wiki, one of the first of its kind in the world, is open to any internet user, police say.

Read full story

Every year, the EU Benchmark Survey assesses the quality of online public services in Europe. For the first time, the survey also looked at the users experience when accessing on-line public services, in recognition of the growing importance of this topic, and found mixed results.

From the press release:

“The survey examined three elements which are important to the user experience: the provision of a legally recognised, secure electronic identity, whether the service could be accessed via alternative channels such as call centres, kiosks, mobile phones and TV, and compliance of the websites with the International Accessibility Guidelines. The overall result for this indicator is more mixed and reaches 19%, with Austria, Bulgaria and Norway scoring above 30%. The most striking finding was that only 5% of websites make a specific reference to their compliance with international accessibility guidelines (WAI).

National portals fared much better. The report looked at the number of basic public services which can be accessed from the portal, the existence of personalised options, ease of navigation and whether its presentation is targeted at different kinds of users (businesses vs. citizens, around life events or around the structure of the administration). The overall score of 75% demonstrates that national governments consider the national portal as one of the cornerstones of their eGovernment plans.”

However the report itself puts some further qualification (page 27) on the above optimistic assessment of the user experience of national portals:

“We conclude that the national portals are well developed as user-centric gateways to public service delivery points.

However on the level of the transactional services itself, the agencies, the e-services delivery is still primarily organised around the needs of governmental organization more than around the needs of the users, being citizens and business. [My emphasis]

The survey, carried out for the European Commission by consultants Capgemini, examined over 14,000 web sites offering 20 basic public services in the 27 EU Member States plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Turkey. In 2007 the online sophistication of public service delivery reached an overall score of 76%, while 58% of the measured public services are fully available online.

Austria stands out both on sophistication and full on-line availability, with scores of 99 and 100% respectively. Portugal has made major progress since 2006 and Malta and Slovenia stand out as countries that have embraced eGovernment and advanced online service delivery and therefore top the charts in 2007.

- Read press release
- Download report (pdf, 15 mb, 123 pages)

Management guru Don Tapscott, the co-author of best-seller “Wikinomics”, wants to teach governments to harness the power of the Internet to reinvent democracy.

Tapscott is an evangelist for Web 2.0, the second-generation Internet based on participation through social communities such as Facebook and MySpace, participatory sites like free encyclopedia Wikipedia, and blogs.

In “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” published this year, he and co-author Anthony Williams dared big companies to reveal their trade secrets on the Web in a gamble to collect the ideas they need from people outside the firm.

Now their thinktank, New Paradigm, is starting a project to involve governments, non-governmental organizations and citizens around the world to revitalize the public sector.

Read full story

Tiago Peixoto sent us a link to this report presenting the results of a joint OECD-World Bank stocktaking of social accountability initiatives in OECD countries. The report which was written by Peixoto, together with Joanne Caddy and Mary McNeil is part of OECD’s efforts to identify emerging trends and develop policy lessons for countries seeking to build more open, accountable and responsive government.

OECD countries have done much to enhance government openness and encourage citizen engagement and participation throughout the past two decades.

Although countries now understand that a whole-of-government perspective is necessary to ensure that system-wide impacts are considered, planning and implementation issues remain. This stocktaking of social accountability initiatives aims to collect information about existing initiatives and country experiences, in an effort to help countries meet these challenges while building more open, accountable and responsive government.

This exercise generated 40 templates detailing social accountability initiatives in 27 OECD countries, and the European Commission. Cases were selected based on focus, level of government, and transferability of policy lessons. The group as a whole illustrates the wealth of innovative practices currently available, and provides a rich resource for practitioners.

Several cases explored the use of online tools to enhance public scrutiny and engagement:
- Canada: Online Pre-Budget Consultation (p. 44)
- Denmark: Danmarksdebatten [currently part of Borger.dk] (p. 55)
- Germany: Online Dialogue Participatory Budgeting (p. 72)
- Hungary: e-Games (p. 81)
- European Union: e-Agora (p. 164)

- Full abstract
- Download publication (pdf, 1.2 mb, 196 pages)

The method of selecting representatives for presenting the view of a constituency was deployed at the time when internet and mobile technologies were not available and there was no method of making a collective decision on policies to government the society.

In today’s times , most of the population have mobile phones that can be used by the citizens to communicate their opinion on important policy issues. Should not we therefore relook at the ways of people representation and amend the democratic processes accordingly?

m-GovWorld is an Indian initiative to create an observatory for mobile government developments and developing a community of stakeholders with the aim to enable acceleration of adoption of mobile technologies by government agencies.

The comments from readers are welcome to suggest innovative ways of making democracy more vibrant using mobile technologies where citizens can be continuously involved in policy decisions rather than voting once in five years.

(via MobileActive.org)

In their most recent book, Don Tapscott and David Ticoll introduce us to the “age of transparency” [book site | blog | amazon page]. They argue that corporations and governments face unrelenting pressures for greater openness that will only increase - and that the costs of resistance far outweigh those of more proactive forms of disclosure. Of course, for many organizations this latter path points to an adaptive challenge of immense proportions.

There are also indications that governments are not only unprepared to adapt, but intent on resisting more openness. Such a claim may at first glance appear out of step with reality; during the first week of July alone, the [US] federal government’s main portal provided more than 200 What’s New announcements. Agencies now routinely publish annual reports detailing their activities and performance, and e-government continues to facilitate online access to more sources of information and programs.

Yet all these examples are elements of a government’s communication apparatus, controlled by central agencies and filtered by political operatives to ensure as much good news as possible. While there is nothing inherently wrong with those in power wanting to be seen to be using it wisely (with an eye to retaining it), troubles mount when other sources of information - multiplying through a ubiquitous media and communications infrastructure - take issue with the government’s message.

Read full story

From climate change to social care, innovation will be critical to meeting the public service challenges of the future. But traditional approaches to generating new ideas will not be enough. Rather than focusing on processes and pipelines, policymakers and service deliverers needs to harness the potential of citizens to be innovators in their own right.

Unlocking Innovation: Why citizens hold the key to public service reform is a publication by the UK think tank Demos that collects essays and analysis from a wide range of public sector experts and practitioners. The pamphlet’s chapters offer lessons on how public services can better engage their users based on examples of best practice in the public and private sectors.

It argues that the public sector must embrace new forms of ‘user-driven innovation’ that use the needs and potential of service users as the spur to radical service redesign.

The publication also presents a series of case studies that showcase citizen-focused innovation in action, including:

• ‘In Control’, a social enterprise that provides social care users with easy and flexible access to individual budgets, making it simple for them to choose their own package of services.
• Hammersmith and Fulham council using detailed survey data to redesign their customer contact centre to better serve local people.
• Public private partnerships for tenant management organisations using deep dialogue with local residents to improve levels of service in social housing.
• ‘Innovative ecosystems’ that have allowed educationalists, academics and artists to come together to build ‘mediascapes’ that allow pupils to enter a virtual world of sights and sounds in order to learn in an interactive and cooperative way.

Download report (pdf, 525 kb, 186 pages)

A new website for young people has been launched by West Sussex County Council aimed at giving them vital information and a voice for their concerns.

The front page of www.yourspacewestsussex.co.uk also has the first details of how young people aged from five to 19 will soon be able to apply for a free ‘3in1′ card that will give them cheaper travel on the buses, an instantly recognisable ‘proof of age’ and discounts with retailers.

The ‘YourSpace’ website also contains information and advice for young people on a wide variety of issues such as bullying and health.

There is also a link to new-look pages for the West Sussex Youth Cabinet, information about clubs, holiday activities, and dance nights for the under 18s.

There will be regular quick polls to find out what young people think about major issues of the day. The first is about the July 1 ban on smoking in public places.

Read full story [eGov monitor]

YouScotland.com is not a political party, it is a citizens’ movement aimed at influencing the political process.

With elections pending to Holyrood and at Council level on Thursday, May 3rd, electoral politics will inevitably dominate the next few weeks. But there will be another 204 weeks before there are new elections to these bodies. It is then we believe youscotland.com will come into its own, irrespective of the results on 3rd May - an online citizen’s voice that will hold the politicians we elect on 3rd May to account.

But we do believe we can have a here and now influence by informing and exposing where parties, politicians, the media and others are clearly “at it”, and we will do so without fear or favour. We are in nobody’s pocket, though we hope we are on the right side.

Demos, the UK think tank for everyday democracy, has published a collection of essays by leading thinkers and practitioners that assesses how far the UK has already come towards a more collaborative style of government and sets out international case studies of some of the most interesting initiatives to date. It concludes by asking how future governments can use collaboration as a key design principle for transforming the UK’s public services.

“Competition and choice have become the watchwords of public service reform over the past decade. But while these principles have delivered some important gains, they are not enough in isolation. Tight accountability and choice have often come at the expense of fragmenting the way that schools, hospitals and councils provide their services. Service improvement has come at the expense of the capacity to solve local people’s problems.

If we want to sustain improvements into the next decade, then we need a new generation of reform that builds on experiments with collaboration between both different parts of the public sector, and between institutions and the people they serve. Joined-up government, place-based policy making and co-production with citizens offer exciting new possibilities for creating flexible, dynamic and democratic public service organisations.”

- Read table of contents
- Download publication (pdf, 1 mb, 203 pages)

Children will be able to find out about Government, public services and the world around them in a fresh, fun and informative way through a new website launched today.

DirectgovKids aims to get children from five to 11 engaged with some of the areas of Government that have an impact on their lives, and to help them learn about and understand the society they are growing up in.

The site is designed to look like a revolving globe, with interactive buildings that children can investigate including: a Town Hall, a Police Station and a School. There are online activities and exciting games, as well as animations and slideshows. New areas are being added all the time and include a Health Centre, a school council voting activity and a special area, where children can have a ‘virtual vote’ on issues that affect them.

Read press release

Involve (an independent UK organisation focused on the practicalities of giving more power to ordinary people) has produced an “Evaluation Guide - Making a Difference: A guide to evaluating public participation in central government”, as a webguide and pdf document.

Public engagement is becoming a central plank of public policy-making. Activities range from large-scale consultations that involve tens of thousands of people, to social and market research, on-line discussion forums and small, deliberative citizens’ juries.

As government increases the scope and size of its public engagement activities, it is becoming increasingly important to assess the effectiveness of the different engagement methods, increase accountability and learn from past experiences. This is where evaluation comes in. Evaluation helps public engagement organisers set and measure attainable objectives, assess impact, and identify lessons for future practice.

Using clear language, simple instructions, illustrative case studies and a glossary, this guide is a valuable tool for anyone involved in running or commissioning public engagement in central government and beyond.

The Council of Europe symposium “e-democracy: new opportunities for enhancing civic participation”, will take place at the Palais de l’Europe, Strasbourg (France) from 23 to 24 April 2007.

The symposium will discuss the nature and added value of e-democracy, based on lessons learnt from e-democracy experiences in Council of Europe member states, and identify areas for future research.

First-rate speakers from public authorities, academia, media, NGOs, political parties and international organisations will share their experiences in state-of-the-art e-democracy applications.

Topics to be debated in plenary and in thematic sessions include government-to-citizen-to-government and citizen-to-citizen communication, e-campaigning and how to measure the impact of e-democracy.

The symposium will be open to the general public on personal confirmation by e-mail after advance registration. On request participants will in relevant cases be sent a formal invitation letter for visa purposes.

There is no participation fee. Simultaneous interpretation in English, French, Spanish and German will be available throughout the symposium.

Further information, the programme and registration forms can be found and downloaded at www.coe.int/democracy. The deadline for registering is Tuesday 3 April 2007.

For any queries please call + 33 3 88 41 28 67

(via eGov monitor)