Anand Giridharadas is one of my favourite writers at the New York Times and this time his reflection on the merits of open societies is particularly thought provoking.

“A stunning idea has entered respectable American discourse of late: that China is not just an economic rival but also a political competitor, with a political system that, despite its own flaws, reveals grave flaws in American democracy and might be inspiring to wavering nations. [...]

The question the reappraisers seem to be asking is whether their belief in bottom-up, spontaneously ordering, self-regulating societies blinded them to other truths (as their enthusiasm for China risks blinding them to the cruelty and violence of autocracy). They are asking: Can openness go too far? Can public opinion be measured too frequently? Can free speech sow disorder? Is the crowd really smarter than the experts? Can transparency hamper governance?

Or, to put it in the terms of an influential 1997 essay, is the bazaar always better than the cathedral?”

Read article

The US General Services Administration (GSA) has just released its Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter.

Entitled “Engaging Citizens in Government“, all of the articles in the current edition should be of interest to those working on the use of ICTs as a means to enhance citizen participation.

Table of contents
- Increasing citizen engagement in government
- By the people, for the people
- Citizen engagement
- National dialogues build communities
- Believable change: a reality check on online participation?
- Reinventing We the People
- Data is not democracy
- Could citizens run the White House online?
- E-petitions preserves an old British tradition
- My better Estonia
- Participatory lawmaking in Brazil
- Brazil and Argentina: from participatory budgeting to e-participatory budgeting
- Pew: well-off and well-educated are more likely to engage
- Public engagement on Fairfax County’s budget
- Citizen engagement in Oakland County
- Washington goes to Mr. Smith: the changing role of citizens in policy development
- Ohio redistricting competition
- Planning for citizen engagement
- Potholes and PDAs
- New media makers pioneer novel forms of news
- Putting your audience to work: EPAs radon video contest
- A millennial model of civic engagement
- Emerging themes for effective online citizen engagement
- The importance of open web standards in the move to open and transparent government

Watch this excellent 1 hour documentary film about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.

“In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s FA Trophy Semi-Final match against Aldershot . Around the world 35,000 other fans are doing the same thing, because together, they own and manage the football club. If distributed networks of people can run complex organisations such as football clubs, what else can they do?

Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.

Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

The founding principles of these projects — transparency, self-selection, open participation — are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition and confronts politicians George Osborne and Ed Milliband with the possibilities for participative government as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky amongst others.”

CONTRIBUTORS: Don Tapscott, Ed Miliband, William Heath, Martin Sticksl, Lee Bryant, Tom Steinberg, Charles Leadbeater, George Osborne, Saul Albert, Mikey Weinkove, Sunny Hundal, Sophia Parker, JP Rangaswami, Paul Miller, Becky Hogge, Matthew Taylor, MT Rainy, Giles Andrews, Clay Shirky, Paul Miller, Sane Kelly, and Liam Daish.

- Us Now project website
- Us Now blog
- Us Now video (Vimeo)

A long article by PBS’s Mark Dupreau:

“It’s easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt if they wish to effectively communicate with their “customers” — a.k.a. their citizens and stakeholders.

I propose that using authentic and transparent personalities as public outreach ambassadors can help transform “government for the people” to “government with the people.” This should also have an indirect positive effect on the government organizations — the brands — they represent.”

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Citizen participation and the internet in urban planning

In this final paper for the Masters of Community Planning degree at the University of Maryland, Rob Goodspeed decided to focus on the history and theory of participation to guide the development of a new model. How have urban planners engaged with the public in the past? What academic theory and professional values guide conventional (offline) participation processes? He then use his findings to describe both why and how the Internet should be used by urban planners. He also translated the paper’s ideas into a series of blog posts published Summer 2008.

The paper contains four parts.

First, Goodspeed describes public participation in urban planning in the context of e-government, or “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services.” The use of the Internet to engage citizens in urban planning has been constrained by the limited availability of suitable technical tools and concerns about digital inequality, as well as a lack of a clear understanding of how technology can meet the needs of citizens and professionals. He describes how new Internet technologies and expanding Internet access addresses these concerns, and why urban planning requires a distinct technological approach from other e-government initiatives.

Second, he reviews the history of participation in American urban planning in order to describe an early, expansive approach to public involvement useful today. Before winning government powers over private actions, early planners communicated directly with citizens in order to build the political support necessary to achieve their plans. Model enabling acts adopted widely by many states as the framework for planning and zoning defined the legal context for official participation practices. Contemporary outreach can build from these early models using Internet tools to achieve consensus about and coordination of new urban development.

Third, the paper describes the theoretical framework of professional planning for participation. Since the late 1960s the definition and rationale for public participation in planning has been intensely debated in professional literature. In recent years, new models of participation have been proposed and professional approaches solidified. The theoretical debates and professional practice of offline public participation can provide perspective and values for a new Internet-centered model.

The paper concludes with a description of a new model of the use of Internet technology for public participation. The Internet is a powerful tool for planners to expand the base of participants in planning processes and enhance traditional engagement approaches. Although Internet technologies are new, the practice of engaging citizens in urban development processes is not. This study contains a critical re-evaluation of planning participation history and theory in order to propose ways Internet tools can be used to realize more inclusive, democratic, and equitable planning processes.

Internet tools for e-democracy in urban planning

This page describes how planners could use internet tools to enhance the practice of planning. Used efficiently, Internet tools could enhance the quality of public debate about planning issues, engage and mobilize previously apathetic citizens, and facilitate the planning process. While face-to-face communications and traditional public engagement methods like public meetings and published reports will continue to be important, they can and should be supplemented with online information and communication.

(via cityofsound)

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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)

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)

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)

Europe has celebrated 50 years of peace and political progression, but the next 50 will see massive changes in the relationship between the electorate and politicians thanks to technology.

That was the message from the Microsoft Government Leader’s Forum 2007 at the Scottish Parliament.

The delegates from more than 40 countries heard from a number of experts (see film archive), speaking about the role technology had played in transforming countries and how citizens engage with their democracies.

Commissioner for Regional Policy, European Commission Danuta Hübner warned European politicians must not rest on their laurels.

“Connecting with our citizens means more than trying to improve things. Citizens want to be more engaged politically, they want to feel ownership of the policies.”

“Information and Communications Technology has already triggered a social revolution in generating change and European politicians must take this into account with the realisation that the individuals are not only citizens but the creators of the content that all can see.”

Some of the other speakers included: Microsoft Corporation chairman Bill Gates, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rt Hon. Gordon Brown MP, First Minister of Scotland Rt. Hon. Jack McConnell MSP, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Wim Kok, Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha, President of Iceland H.E. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, Slovenian Minister for Public Administration Dr. Gregor Virant, Finnish MP Hanna-Leena Hemming, Vice Mayor of Lyon France Jean-Michel Daclin, Scottish Parliament Presiding Officer George Reid MSP, and YouGov Chairman Peter Kellner.

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In the age of ubiquitous participatory culture – from the explosion in user generated media to the very way we do business, art, collaboration and even education – the world of politics often feels left behind, writes Robin Good on his blog.

“Democracy has become indirect, stale and something far removed from the daily lives of everyday people. But this is changing.”

“Participatory democracy is high on the agenda of the European Citizens’ Initiative (or ECI) who are launching their campaign today in the European Parliament in Brussels. The aim of this ambitious campaign is to empower citizens to propose concrete policy and legal changes to the European Commission, by exercising the right of initiative.”

“With hundreds of organizations behind them, and volunteers in their thousands, the ECI are determined to show that collective action can have a direct impact on the way we live our lives as active producers, rather than passive consumers of democracy.”

“Bringing power to the people that are effected directly by legislation is a bold and necessary measure in an age when accountability is often swept under the carpet, and politicians increasingly fail to represent the interests of those that elected them once the final votes are cast.”

“By attempting to gather one million signatures, the ECI campaign aims to gain the right of initiative, so that European citizens and civil society organizations could then directly influence the political agenda of the EU for the first time in history. With one million citizens collective voices, it is possible to demand changes to European law and policy, placing the right to challenge the actions of politicians firmly in the hands of the people at street level.”

In this exclusive video interview with the ECI’s Carsten Berg, and former rector of the College of Europe and supporter of the cause Gabriel Fragniere, Robin Gold “talks through the key questions about what the ECI aims to achieve, how it can be done, and what you can do to make a difference in the emerging participatory democracy that promises to tip power in favor of everyday people.”

- Read full story
- Read full story (versione italiana)

Designing for civil society, a blog maintained by British writer and consultant David Wilcox, features some interesting posts lately.

“Making e-democracy part of the everyday – even if that’s YouTube rules” is the title of one of the comments he wrote about the eDemocracy 2006 conference.

The comment spotlights Molly Webb, web manager at Demos who recently won an award for their site; Jo Twist, a senior research fellow at IPPR, where she is heading up their Digital Society and Media programme; and Twist’s colleague Kay Withers, who is working on Emerging Local Media and Citizenship in a Converged Digital Society.

Webb feels that “the main e-democracy focus on politics, government and citizens didn’t fully acknowledge all the activities people engage in online to express their social concerns and aspirations.” “Politics,” she says, “is on the street – outside Whitehall.”

Twist argues that “E-government shouldn’t just take offline processes and digitize them. We should be thinking about how the trends online are opening up new possibilities for communication and collective efficacy.”

Withers raises a similar issue: “As the idea of handing down power from Whitehall to the town hall, to citizens and local communities gains currency, the question which remains unanswered is how digital media and technologies can work more effectively at local levels to represent, enhance, and support real needs, as well as amplify voices and increase participation in decision making.”

The post also contains videos of Webb and Twist.

More articles and videos related to the eDemocracy 2006 conference are linked from this summary page.

The current issue of User Experience, the membership magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association is devoted to user-centred e-government, with five articles on the topic, including one by Experientia partners Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken.

Tom James described how the website of the Salisbury District Council, a UK local authority, changed from a council-centred view to a user-centred view, with the result that the site leapt to the first sport in the SiteMorse survey of UK local authority websites.

Also the Aberdeenshire Council, another UK local authority, implemented a user-centred design approach, write Chris Rourke and Ross Philip. To make sure that government services were highly accessible and usable, the team involved captured user preferences through card sorting, established usability goals and metrics, conducted iterative reviews throughout the design process, and performed usability testing with end users.

Giaele Roccia leads the usability team of CSI-Piemonte, a big semi-public software company that is in charge of most software development for public authorities and entities in the Italian region of Piedmont. In her article she examines how legislative and technological impetus have resulted in strong attention to accessibility compliance, and less strong but growing support of user-centred design techniques in the Piedmont region of Italy. Here as elsewhere, the business case must be made evident to encourage public agencies to apply UCD principles to their websites.

Also written in Piedmont is the contribution by Experientia partners Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken.
The article “Encouraging Participatory Democracy: A Study of 30 Government Websites” starts from the premise that for the first time in history, a wide distribution of technology allows citizens to get involved in public governance and participate in institutional life on a very regular basis. Yet websites of public authorities are barely taking advantage of the power of the participatory citizen.
Two factors play a key role in this gap. First, the average citizen is not well informed about how basic democratic institutions function, which dramatically reduces the citizen’s capacity to influence the democratic process. Websites can help reduce the complexity of public institutions and get people to understand the way institutions and public administrations function and behave. Second, access to public services online is increasingly separated from institutional information. While online service sites are popular, the role of the institutional sites is not clear. The authors argue that these sites can and should take on the role of a two-way communications tool on topics of policy and politics, support knowledge sharing on areas covered by the authority, and create maximum transparency on what the public administration actually does.
To better understand the opportunities, challenges and evolutions that are affecting public institution websites, the authors studied the main sites of 30 public authorities and identified several innovative approaches. A first analysis shows that a lot remains to be improved. Almost all the sites analysed share three characteristics: (1) policy priorities are not concisely communicated and easy to understand, (2) there is only limited innovation in how regional or municipal institutions present themselves; and (3) there are no tools for active participation.
However, some of the studied sites provide elements of innovation that can be used as models and inspirations. The authors conclude that to improve information access, better communication strategies are needed and to increase participation, better usability is of crucial importance.

Jon Armstrong finally argues that e-government needs to do more to ensure citizens’ privacy. After all if government agencies adhere to privacy laws while developing e-Government solutions, then it is likely that their citizenry will increase its reliance on online government resources, safe in the knowledge that serious data protection has been implemented. Armstrong looks at Victoria, an Australian state, as a case-study example. On the website there is also a short interview of Jon Armstrong by Michele Visciola on the issue of privacy and usability.

The magazine also contains Michele Visciola’s review of the book Ambient Findability by Peter Morville.

The peer-reviewed content of User Experience is not available online but printed copies of the magazine can be bought in the UPA Store.

The UK Government launched today the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE), set to drive up eParticipation rates in the UK through providing best practice advice and support to local authorities.

The aim is for seamless, personalised services that respond directly to people’s needs and are delivered in the way that best suits the individual.

ICELE will work with all stakeholders to help ensure local people are well informed and have a real voice in local decision making, as well as spreading this knowledge and learning. Democratic participation is steadily declining, yet opportunities to involve local people in local decision making are growing every day. From text voting through to online consultations, the organisers paln to harness new technologies to make it easy for people across the country to get involved in the democratic process.

The Centre is designed to serve as a ‘virtual’ focal point for collaborative eDemocracy initiatives both in the UK and abroad. Within the UK, local authorities, community groups and citizens can use the Centre’s online resources to help run projects in their local area.

Internationally, governments, academic institutions and not-for-profit organisations can use the Centre’s virtual facilities as a first point of call for information about pioneering e-democracy initiatives.

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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.

Over the summer the RED unit of the UK Design Council ran a short design project to reconnect politicians with voters.

“We did not concentrate on the high road to democratic reform: Lords Reform, Electoral reform, devolution, or constitutional reform. But, focused instead on the low road to democratic renewal. We looked at how voters experience their local constituency MP.”

“We did 3 things. Firstly, we talked to the public to get a better understanding of the problem. We ran a design workshop for 15 MPs and their staff to get them to put themselves in the shoes of the public. And finally we developed some prototyped practical solutions working for a week in an MP’s constituency office in Doncaster.”

“We viewed MPs as a provider of a service to a local community, and tried to develop a new ’service offering’ for them. This included some familiar and unfamiliar ideas. The familiar ideas, included services like newsletters websites and surgeries. The unfamiliar included group surgeries, street surgeries, clusters, reverse invitations, the new local Hansard and a constitupedia.”

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Patient Opinion is all about enabling (UK) patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

Patient Opinion is a revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.

Funded jointly by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, Patient Opinion is a new non-profit company led by experienced GP and social entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Hodgkin. Based on his experience, and the service improvement requirements of the NHS, Dr. Hodgkin identified two major communication gaps which Patient Opinion will address:

• Patients and carers are now being provided with greater choice of specialist treatment options and locations – but they have little information on which options are best for them, without which choosing can be a lottery.
   
• The NHS has put in place lots of reporting and rating systems – but this formal ‘performance’ data seldom records the real experience of patients and carers.