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.

‘Digital Dialogues‘ is an independent investigation into the use of online technologies to promote dialogue between the UK’s central government and the public.

The Digital Dialogues pilot is an initiative established by the Democratic Engagement Branch in the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA).

The Hansard Society’s eDemocracy Programme was commissioned to administer ‘Digital Dialogues’ and produce the case study evaluations. The Hansard Society is an independent, non-partisan educational charity.

Phase One of ‘Digital Dialogues’ took place between December 2005 – June 2006. The interim report released in December covers Phase One and contains case studies and draft guidance from that phase.

Six case study evaluations were completed in Phase One, involving a cross-section of central government agencies, departments and ministerial offices. The case studies used web-based applications, including blogs, forums, surveys and webchats.

Evaluations were generated through analysis of site statistics, interviews with case study owners in government, and surveys with registrants and site users.

Phase Two of ‘Digital Dialogues’ is scheduled to be conducted between August 2006 – February 2007. It provides an opportunity for longitudinal evaluation of case studies to test the guidance created following Phase One. In addition, phase two will make available applications that are beginning to see mainstream use – wikis, podcasting, file-sharing directories, audio-visual blogs, mapping software, virals. New case-study leaders will also be encouraged to combine applications – for example, converging polling software with forums, or photo-sharing with mapping tools. Any applications will be offered the opportunity to make use of one or more of these platforms in isolation from or in parallel to conventional, offline techniques.

The report from this phase is scheduled for April 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(via Loïc Le Meur)

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

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.

On his blog Lunch over IP, Bruno Giussani discusses some high-level experiments in “participative” democracy online.

"After experimenting with participative democracy in my region, I became convinced that citizens are often experts and can contribute to solve problems". Feel there is something wrong with this sentence? (What form of democracy do you know that’s not "participative"?) It’s signed by Segolène Royal, the front-runner for the socialist nomination in next year’s French presidential election. She is trying to develop her program/platform online, "participatively", through a website called "Désir d’avenir" ("Longing for a future") where she posts drafts of her ideas and lets people comment on them. The resulting synthesis "of the ideas that I deem feasible will be published on the site, so that your contributions will be fruitful"…

José Luis Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, is testing the online waters too: PSOEtv (where PSOE is the acronym for the Spanish socialist - majority - party), which is arguably Europe’s first online TV channel by a major political party, just launched. It has immediately been nicknamed "Telezapatero" and the first show featured the Prime Minister stating that the aim of PSOEtv is to "inform the citizens and let them participate in the government’s actions". The participation bit is not clear though: all there is is a button saying "your comments", which takes users to an e-mail form.

Antonio Di Pietro, the man behind the famous Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) enquiry and currently Minister of Infrastructure in the Prodi government, launched a blog in January 2006 to enable “direct communication and participation for people in the political life”. Interestingly (and exceptionally), the blog content is identical in English and Italian.

Today, he writes that at the national conference of his political party, Italia dei Valori, he also invited a group of bloggers, because, he says, the internet can be a “tool for direct democracy, “thanks to the possibility of giving direct knowledge about the facts whether they are political or related to the actions of the government”. He believes “that this is a first for such a group to be officially present at a political meeting”.

French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur, who is the executive vp & managing director of Europe of Six Apart, the company behind TypePad and Movable Type, immediately picked up on this.

(via Loïc Le Meur)

“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.

“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.”

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.

Démocratie 2.0 - La prochaine révolution sur internet sera politique…

Démocratie 2.0 - The next internet revolution will be political…

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.

DoWire is your primary source for what’s important and happening with the convergence of democracy and the Internet around the world. DoWire is a free, low volume, moderated blog and e-mail announcement list.

Launched in January 1998, DoWire connects over 2750 experts, practitioners, journalists, and citizens across 80 countries. If you are interested in democracy online - including politics online, new media, e-governance, e-government, online advocacy and activism, citizen e-participation and related topics, then join us.

Democracies Online, the blog/newswire, the wiki (with its UK case studies), and interactive groups are a public service hosted by Steven Clift. They are designed to share information about e-democracy on the global basis as well as connect information-age democracy builders for knowledge exchange.

La incorporación de nuevas herramientas, denominadas de software social, a la administración pública no está haciendo más que empezar. Desde hace muy poco la nueva página de la Generalitat de Cataluña se está implicando en aplicar nuevos conceptos de web al desarrollo de su presencia en Internet. Un concepto de web llamado 2.0 y que se caracteriza por utilizar elementos que la diferencian de lo que hasta ahora se ha venido realizando tal como utilizar Ajax en sus desarrollos, crear canales de sindicación mediante RSS, implementación de Google Mini como buscador, generación de blogs, proyecto de redes sociales (e-Catalunya)…

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Is Web 2.0 in government an oxymoron? It would seem that Uncle Sam in particular could easily fall out of step with a “new” Web of blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS. Yet last week’s “Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Government” in Washington, DC, suggests that federal Web managers are indeed exploring Web 2.0 technologies.

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The participation sector has spawned a large amount of research, methodology, and consulting services, but remarkably little new thinking about how to get better results from consultation and participation exercises. In the late 90’s, the Internet and related technologies were seen as a potential solution to these problems, but the majority of early e-government and e-democracy initiatives have been little more than old thinking disseminated using new media. However, the outlines of a new approach are beginning to take shape that draws on recent thinking in online social networks and the emerging culture of the World Wide Web to offer some lessons for the future.

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Open Polis è una community di persone che si interessano di politica e nuovi media. Alcuni lavorano da anni nel campo delle nuove tecnologie, altri stanno nelle universita’ e nella scuola.

Open Polis is a community of people interested in politics and new media. Some work in the field of technologies, others are at educational institutions and universities.