A new initiative by Israel’s parliament will soon allow every Israeli citizen to share his or her proposal for new legislation by cellular phone text messaging.

The “Knesset SMS” program, conceived by MK Israel Hasson (Israel Our Home), will be activated and managed by his bureau. Hasson will select the best suggestions and will officially propose them to the Knesset.

So how will all this work? A citizen who wants to propose an amendment to a particular law or advance an idea for a new law can send a brief summary of his idea over the phone. The SMS must open with the word “law”, followed by the written proposal.

The message must be sent to the phone number 5454, at a cost of 40 Agorot (about 10 cents) per message.

The proposals will automatically be presented on MK Hasson’s Web site. Every few weeks, Hasson will sift through the suggestions while consulting with legal advisors and his office colleagues. He will present those deemed suitable to the Knesset as law proposals.

Read full story

(via textually.org)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“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.

Planning Portal is not only a successful example of technology enablement in service delivery but could prove to be a tremendous asset for local authorities in their quest to develop and deliver citizen centric services, says eGov monitor.

Just under two years ago, the [UK] Government unveiled its ambition to develop a world class e-Planning Service which would deliver new, more efficient ways of enabling the community to engage in a shared vision for their local area.

This new service would also enable access to high quality, relevant information and guidance as well as streamlined processes for sharing and exchanging information amongst key players.

Since then, e-Planning has made significant progress towards meeting its goals, and it has been recognised as one of the major successes of technology aided service delivery. This is especially true for the Planning Portal, which continues to improve itself and has been recognised through numerous awards.

Read full story

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

“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

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

Recently, reports FutureLab, Motorola created a new community edited “user manual” for its new Q Phone. Essentially Motorola has set up a wiki, using the same software as wikipedia, that anyone can edit to serve as the new phones user manual.

Because the possible applications for the Q will always expand, the “ideal” user guide would also be able to grow and change. This wiki is an attempt to do that. It’s a place to capture and share the knowledge of the greater community of Q users. If, for example, you have added a new application to your Q, you could post instructions on how you did it here, for the benefit of all Q users.

Again, only a tiny percentage of the customer base will actually contribute to this wiki, but it will provide a huge amount if value to the larger community.

What if a public authority did the same for how to best interact with public services? Citizens would write from their perspective, rather than from an institutional perspective, and could help guide other citizens within a system which is sometime difficult to navigate initally?

While nonprofits and campaign organizations are still focusing on top-down organization to raise money and build support, other groups are working to build environments for a deeper kind of democracy that’s based on collaboration, talking, listening, and learning, much of it mediated by social technology.

Read full story

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.

Democrazia elettronica partecipazione pubblica (DEPP) è un’associazione senza scopo di lucro che promuove l’uso delle rete per favorire la trasparenza pubblica e la partecipazione collettiva al controllo delle informazioni e delle scelte politiche.

Crediamo nel potere della collaborazione, della condivisione, della creatività collettiva, del dono, del gioco, della passione disinteressata, del controllo comunitario senza centri di comando.

Sosteniamo e utilizziamo il software libero e aperto , il sapere, la conoscenza e la creatività liberi da diritti d’autore, i Creative Commons , le reti peer to peer.

Ci proponiamo di lavorare a progetti che sperimentino forme evolute di democrazia che favoriscano nuove relazioni tra rappresentanti e rappresentati.

Intendiamo collaborare con le istituzioni pubbliche e sviluppare progetti indipendenti sostenuti da comunità di persone e gruppi.

voi siete qui è il primo strumento del progetto openpolis, per una politica liberamente accessibile, modificabile e migliorabile dalla comunità degli utenti.

Un intervento permanente nella cosa pubblica, di controllo e influenza sulle scelte politiche.

L’idea è dare uno strumento che permetta a tutti di confrontare i programmi dei partiti su 25 temi fondamentali.

I prossimi strumenti saranno progettati per permettere il monitoraggio comunitario, per ognuno dei 25 temi, delle posizioni di tutti i partiti nel corso della prossima legislatura (prima delle elezioni hanno detto questo, dopo hanno fatto…).

Tutti i progetti di openpolis sono geneticamente open publishing, open content, open source creati e moderati dalla comunita’. Per saperne di piu’ vai su openpolis.

L’idea del progetto openpolis, di cui voi siete qui è il primo strumento, parte dai soci dell’associazione democrazia elettronica e partecipazione pubblica.

Poi si e’ allargata a un gruppo di persone che si interessano della politica e di nuovi media. Alcuni lavorano da anni nel campo delle nuove tecnologie, altri stanno nelle universita’ e nelle scuole. Tutti condividono i principi del progetto. Siamo una comunita’ che vuole crescere, in fretta.

Il sito Voisietequi.it nasce come nuovo strumento per un’azione attiva sull’amministrazione pubblica

Di quali strumenti dispongono i cittadini che intendono monitorare e valutare la politica del proprio paese? Da tempo due siti britannici, Theyworkforyou.com e Opendemocracy.net, lavorano per consentire alla popolazione inglese un controllo più attivo della pubblica amministrazione. Queste esperienze segnalano dunque internet come un valido sistema per avvicinare le masse alla politica favorendo il coinvolgimento trasversale degli individui.

Adesso, attraverso il sito Voisietequi.it, è stato avviato anche in Italia un simile percorso per incentivare la partecipazione. Tramite questo nuovo progetto i cittadini avranno la possibilità di confrontare le posizioni dei partiti sulle questioni più importanti della campagna elettorale, di comprendere quale formazione politica è più in sintonia con le proprie idee e, soprattutto, di conservare un archivio di tutte le promesse dei partiti per poi verificarne in seguito il mantenimento. Questa iniziativa nasce come strumento di lancio di un progetto più vasto, che si svilupperà sulle pagine del sito Openpolis.it.

Read full story