A new study has shown that public involvement in policy-making is unlikely to become more prevalent in the information age - confounding hopes of e-democracy enthusiasts everywhere for a strengthened state of democratic engagement.

The study - titled “Information Technology and Public Commenting on Agency Regulations” appears in the first issue of Regulation & Governance, a new journal of Wiley-Blackwell.

Professor Steven Balla and Benjamin Daniels of George Washington University tested, for the first time, the assumption that the information age will bring forth a new age of enriched democracy over government regulation.

Regulatory agencies have historically been receiving public feedback on proposals via written comments that were either mailed or hand delivered to agency headquarters - making it difficult for most citizens to gain access to, or have an awareness of, available materials. The onslaught of the information age brought renewed hope among regulatory observers that the Internet would bring agency policymaking closer to the public - enabling greater citizen involvement.

The Balla and Daniels study compares hundreds of rulemakings before and after one of the world’s first systems for electronic commenting was introduced in the United States in 1998 - before concluding that levels of participation were almost identical across both periods, indicating that the advent of the Internet has not changed the public’s participation patterns in rulemaking.

Professor Balla said, “Paper processes have been automated, yes. But this automation does not appear likely to significantly increase, for good or for bad, the public’s engagement in rulemaking - a very important mode of policymaking.”

Professor Balla concluded that “public involvement in rulemaking is not likely to become vastly more prevalent in the information age, confounding both hopes of democratization of the process and fears of costly and harmful mass participation.”

(re-posted from Kansas City infoZine News via E-Government News)

An increasing amount of municipalities, public/non-profit institutions and communities around the world seem to be discovering and adopting ‘participatory budgeting‘, ‘a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, in which ordinary city residents decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget.’ (Wikipedia) In terms of its underlying philosophy, the idea lines up with other initiatives in new open society models, participatory, peer to peer democracy, citizen participation, direct stakeholder democracy etc.

The participatory approach to budgeting originated in South America, in cities such as Porto Alegre and Sao Paolo (more examples here). More than 200 cities in Brazil alone now seem to have adopted the process and the idea is spreading to other parts of the world as well as different contexts.

(via A Thousand Tomorrows)

Gov2U was founded in 2005 with the intention of harnessing the potential of ICTs as vital tools for the improvement of representative democracy.

Gov2U believes that new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) offer vital opportunities for bringing about a fundamental change to the workings of traditional democratic systems. By enabling and facilitating new forms of interaction within parliaments, and via citizen engagement in the political process, ICTs can help meet the challenge of creating more representative and efficient democratic systems.

The main crux of their activities is the research, development and deployment of open source enabling technologies to facilitate legislative information gathering and dissemination. In parallel, they are involved in the targeted dissemination of knowledge and best practice through the organisation of, and participation in, conferences, meetings, seminars and publications.

Towards the achievement of this aim, Gov2u has created the Gov2DemOSS platform, an open source, generic but customisable, informative and collaborative e-participation platform.

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.

Design for Democracy increases civic participation by making the experience clearer, more understandable, easier to accomplish and more trustworthy.

Design and social research professionals collaborate to enable compelling, efficient and trust-building experiences between government and the governed.

On a nonprofit basis, Design for Democracy offers consultation services to federal, state and local government agencies by developing models and prototypes to address large and small civic communication or industrial design problems. We consult with groups who work with government agencies in order to institutionalize design standards.

Design for Democracy helps government agencies find either national or local professional designers and researchers within its membership, who, on a for-hire basis, will test and implement designs.

Design for Democracy is a strategic program of AIGA, the professional association for design.

The New Politics Institute has just put out a white paper on Mobile Media in 21st Century Politics. The white-paper was prepared by Tim Chambers and Rob Sebastian of the Media 50 Group, a new player on the mobile political field and one whose founders, like Politxt, comes from a plethora of mobile experience in the entertainment space.

Here is what Peter Leyden, Director of the New Politics Institute, has to say:

That small screen on your phone is beginning to take its place alongside the personal computer and television as an important way to connect to Americans. The development of mobile media is not going to take place in the distant future. As this report points out, mobile media has already proven to have big political impacts in other countries, and it played a key role in the immigration demonstrations all over the United States this spring. Now is the time for progressive political practitioners to start to engage this new technology and media. The report ends with seven concrete steps to begin mastering this new world. Much is already happening, but much more is to come.

The impact of new Internet tools on politics is getting all the attention in the fall of 2006, but a whole new terrain is opening up that will also have big political consequences in the year or two ahead.

The mobile phone has evolved from simply a voice communicator to a hub for mobile media. That small screen on your phone is beginning to take its place alongside the personal computer and television as an important way to connect to Americans. Each of these screens has unique capabilities that can be used in politics. Mobile phone media, unlike media channeled through TV and PCs, allow people to connect anytime, anywhere. Today 80 percent of voting age Americans have mobile phones and an increasing number are becoming savvy at using them to create and consume media. Some constituencies are more savvy or dependent on mobile phones than others.

Two key groups in are of special concern to progressives. Any majority political movement of the early 21st century will need to connect to the massive young generation of Millennials, and the booming population of Hispanics. Both groups are among the top users of mobile phone media. The development of mobile media is not going to take place in the distant future. As this report points out, mobile media has already proved to have had big political impacts in other countries, and it played a key role in the immigration demonstrations all over the United States this spring.

Now is the time for progressive political practitioners to start to engage this new technology and media. The report ends with seven concrete steps to begin mastering this new world. The very first step, though, is to get an overview of the whole booming field by reading this comprehensive paper.

It is filled with startling facts and figures that will help even those who think they understand what is going on: Did you know that mobile video services already reach more users than the 8th largest cable operator in the country? That by 2008 as many as 30 percent of wireless phone users will not own a land line? (What will political pollsters do?) That last year U2’s Bono got 800,000 people to sign up for the One Campaign to eradicate poverty by sending a text message through their mobile phones at his concerts? Much is already happening, but much more is to come. The New Politics Institute wants to help progressives figure this out. This report was done by one of the New Politics Institute’s new fellows, Tim Chambers, and his business partner in a new wireless company. They are generously passing on what they know to up the game of the progressive movement as a whole.

Overall a must read for anyone considering a mobile campaign strategy for political agendas and a great introduction to Media 50 Group for your consideration.

Download report (pdf, 38 pages)

(via MobileActive)

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)

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

“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.

It’s been 12 years since the U.S. government went online, writes Robert D. Atkinson in Public CIO Magazine. The first stage of e-government meant a passive presence on the Web based on information, but not citizen interaction. The public sector evolved to the second stage: developing web applications that allowed individuals to interact with government, such as paying parking tickets and renewing drivers’ licenses.

But most governments have been slow to move to the third stage of e-government — creating functionally oriented, citizen-centered Web presences by breaking down bureaucratic barriers. Too often, existing e-government applications are user-unfriendly, designed around agencies’ needs rather than citizens’.

Some in government have pushed hard to get to stage three, but all too often, they’ve faced stiff resistance. By their very nature, governments have a hard time building applications that link together multiple agencies and programs, and an even harder time linking applications that cut across levels of government.

Few agencies see their job as helping users solve problems or access information, including information from other related agencies, other levels of government and even private-sector players. Rather, the default attitude is to present only their agency’s information and applications. As a result, it doesn’t appear that governments acting alone will any time soon make the kinds of fundamental changes needed to bring about true citizen-centered e-government.

Government and the private sector have already engaged in successful partnerships in numerous areas. One of the most widely used is tax preparation and filing. […]

It’s time to build on this model by empowering for-profit and nonprofit organizations to help citizens and businesses interact electronically with government, particularly in areas that are inherently complex or involve cross-agency and cross-government functions.

To do this, governments must think of themselves less as direct providers of e-government services and more as enablers of third-party integrators that tie together multiple agencies across multiple levels of government to package information, forms, regulations, and other government services and requirements in user-friendly ways.

Moving to this model has the potential to dramatically boost the uptake of digital government services, cut costs for both government and users, and make the experience of dealing with government less frustrating. Intermediaries can play a key role in two kinds of tasks: building and operating function-based portals, and creating digital integration tools.

Read full story

“Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. We envision this site as one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens.”

“Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to experiment with various ways of nurturing and expanding this conversation, ranging from blogging to investigative journalism, interviews, profiles and guest columns. The focus is going to be on new tools, processes, uses and trends–not on scoring partisan political points. We value your input and ideas.”

More Perfect is an interesting new site for collaboration on policy prototypes. Built on MediaWiki, the site allows anyone to add or change issues or policies. For example, you can rewrite the United States Constitution, and you can question/discuss changes or additions. This is potentially a great tool for evolving policy with a high degree of openness, transparency, and citizen participation.

In the words of More Perfect’s co-founder and CEO Tim Killian “We want to become the place were people gather to discuss, improve and create better laws and public policy. More people. More ideas. More perfect.”

More Perfect has just announced its first direct partnership, with the People’s Waterfront Coalition (PWC) in Seattle to facilitate citizen involvement in a “transit and streets” proposal for replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. There are sections for defining the problem, setting goals, and determining a plan for action. Much of the content already on the site focuses on Seattle and Washington State, but there’s sections for all states to have voters’ guides and townhalls. The site also integrates a WordPress blog and phpBB forums.

Read full story

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)

Read full story (permanent link)

“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

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.

Read full story