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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via eGov monitor)

Recently the UK Department of Constitutional Affairs published a report into ‘The Future of Citizenship‘ (pdf, 645 kb, pages), an ambitious study which looks at how our definitions and behaviours of citizenship might change over the next 20 years.

The report outlines four possible scenarios for where we might be in 2027. The different scenarios assume different levels of economic development and civic activism.

The first ‘Global politics’ assumes that global shocks such as Climate Change lead to a global sense of responsibility and citizenship. In this scenario international agreements have a lot of public support.

Scenario 2 (’Charity begins at home’) assumes that economic growth is combined with increased civic activism, creating a scenario where philanthropism and volunteering is widespread. The downside is that much of this activity takes place within relatively closed communities and that those who refuse to get involved are vilified by the rest of society.

In scenario 3 (’Tribal politics’) the economy stagnates and society becomes increasingly fragmented. Politics becomes dominated by interest groups fiercely competing for limited resources and the interest of minorities is frequently overlooked. Civic engagement is largely reactive and limited to when ones own interests are threatened.

Lastly, scenario 4 (’Remote self’) assumes that economic growth is combined with an increasingly disengaged population. This leads to a situation where the role of the state is limited and where the gulf between haves and have nots grows without any significant public reaction. People are increasingly individualistic and uninterested in the collective good. The government is increasingly called upon to used technological fixes, such as tele-voting, to curb the disengagement of citizens.

When asked which of these scenarios were most desirable and which were most likely government policy makers said that they would prefer a combination of scenarios 1 and 2 but that they thought that scenario 4 was most likely.

(via Involve)

Online petitions like the 1.8m-strong one against road pricing risk undermining representative democracy, a committee of senior MPs warned today.

Last month the prime minister, Tony Blair, was forced to send out a personalised email response to all of the signatories on an electronic petition to Downing Street demanding an end to congestion charging plans.

Today Tory and Labour MPs on the influential public administration select committee cast doubt on the use of online petitions by Downing Street.

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Recently the Downing Street website crashes under the weight of e-mails from angry voters.

The road pricing petition, which saw 1.8 million people e-mailing the Downing Street website, was arguably the biggest protest against government policy since 2003’s anti-war march.

The question now asked by Brian Wheeler, political reporter of BBC News, is where does it go from here? And is it a good or bad thing for democracy?

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‘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.

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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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.

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.

Tony Blair’s outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a “crisis” in the relationship between politicians and voters, writes Brian Wheeler on BBC News Online.

Matthew Taylor - who stressed he was speaking as a “citizen” not a government spokesman - said the web could be “fantastic” for democracy.

But it was too often used to encourage the “shrill discourse of demands” that dominated modern politics.

He was speaking on the day Mr Blair carried out an online interview.

Mr Taylor said Mr Blair’s online grilling from voters - and other initiatives such as environment secretary David Miliband’s blog and Downing Street’s new online petition service - showed the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.

But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to “solve problems” rather than simply abuse politicians or make “incommensurate” demands on them.

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By almost every measure, public confidence and trust in politicians and political institutions is slipping.

The RED unit of the UK Design Council looked at the problem from a local and practical perspective and wanted to find out what MPs could do differently in their constituency to rebuild our democracy and public faith in it.

In this short project they carried out two weeks of user research, ran a design workshop with 15 MPs and spent an intensive week working alongside the constituency office for Doncaster North.

Their report sets out ten practical things every MP can do to rebuild democracy in their constituency.

Download report (pdf, 1.34 mb, 25 pages)

PASC – the UK Public Administration Select Committee - launches a new inquiry into the role that “customers” or “users” should have in shaping or even helping to provide public services.

The establishment of the Parliamentary Ombudsman scheme in 1967, and the introduction of the Citizen’s Charter in 1991 reflected an emerging consensus that public service users have a right to minimum standards, and a right to some recourse when those standards are not met. More recently a number of initiatives aimed at improving public services have put renewed emphasis on the citizen as a ‘customer’, ‘consumer’ or ‘user’ rather than passive recipient of the service.

This inquiry seeks to build on the Committee’s previous report into “Choice, Voice and Public Services” by considering the development of “voice” in the design and delivery of public services: mechanisms for complaint and redress, customer feedback, official consultations, and dedicated user representative bodies. It asks whether users should be more directly involved in service delivery - and if so, how this might be achieved.

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(via eGov Monitor)

Next week is the 10th anniversary of the birth of e-government in the UK. Michael Cross of The Guardian looks at how it came to be, and asks what progress - if any - has been made.

“In 1996, a green paper called Government Direct (”e” was not yet a business buzzword) set out a vision of citizens paying their taxes, receiving benefits and taking part in the democratic process via new electronic channels.”

“A decade on, after spending several billion pounds building websites, the government is only now getting to grips with many of the challenges the green paper set.”

[…] “For all the talk of radical reform, however, government bureaucracy of 2006 is much the same as it was when the Spice Girls were in the charts. The latest rebranding of the e-revolution, under the name Transformational Government, is wrestling with the same questions raised by Government Direct - how to orient services around the user, how to authenticate citizens’ identities electronically and how to share data in a legal and ethical way. We are no closer to creating a one-stop death notification service for the bereaved.”

Back in 1996, Colin Muid (one of the authors of the 1996 report) says, “We were saying ‘let’s clear up this mess’.” And what about now? “Now? We’ve got a digital interface to that mess.”

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