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.

Read full story

Involve (an independent UK organisation focused on the practicalities of giving more power to ordinary people) has produced an “Evaluation Guide - Making a Difference: A guide to evaluating public participation in central government”, as a webguide and pdf document.

Public engagement is becoming a central plank of public policy-making. Activities range from large-scale consultations that involve tens of thousands of people, to social and market research, on-line discussion forums and small, deliberative citizens’ juries.

As government increases the scope and size of its public engagement activities, it is becoming increasingly important to assess the effectiveness of the different engagement methods, increase accountability and learn from past experiences. This is where evaluation comes in. Evaluation helps public engagement organisers set and measure attainable objectives, assess impact, and identify lessons for future practice.

Using clear language, simple instructions, illustrative case studies and a glossary, this guide is a valuable tool for anyone involved in running or commissioning public engagement in central government and beyond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Read full story

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?

Read full story

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.

Read full story

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)

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.

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)

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.”

Read full story

Falling voter numbers in elections across the European continent suggest people are increasingly disenchanted with the political process. Could an enhanced webcasting system, tested by local authorities in four countries, solve this ‘democratic deficit’ and help to bind communities together?

Martine Ruzza certainly thinks so. A member of the eParticipate project, part of the eTEN programme facilitating e-services for European Union citizens, she highlights the praise heaped on its system, and the resulting webcasts, by participants at the June 2006 ‘ICT for an inclusive society’ conference in Riga, Latvia. This event also generated a groundbreaking declaration on e-democracy.

“One-way internet portals are no longer good enough,” says Ruzza. “People want two-way communication with their local authorities, so they can consult documents, provide feedback and so on. Our system addresses all these requirements.”

The project, which ended in September 2006, builds on an open and interactive video platform developed by the UK company Public-i. Though based on webcasting, this platform offers far more than the streaming of sound and vision over the internet. Its main feature is ‘contextualisation’ – providing additional information on the speakers filmed at events. So a webcast may include textual details on their name and function, plus a biography, photos and email address.

Read full story

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)

‘Facilitating Active Citizenship’ is the title of a status report on eParticipation in the UK and Germany, published by the British Council in Germany in co-operation with politik-digital, a German organisation that monitors the impact of the German-language Internet on citizen-friendly political communication. The study is available in German and English.

The report itself draws few direct comparisons or conclusions, beyond noting that eDemocracy, like any other democracy, is nothing if not participative. For the most part, the study consists of well-researched and interesting practical examples from both countries.

An accompanying article on politik-digital digs a little deeper. “It is noticeable that eParticipation in Britain is already much more strongly integrated into everyday political life than in Germany,” writes politik-digital’s Christoph Dowe. “The Scottish and British parliaments provide extensive good practice on getting citizens and politicians talking to each other better. British public service broadcasting has now come to see itself as also being an ‘enabler’, not only delivering information but also creating the infrastructure for citizens to become politically active themselves.”

Dowe ascribes the differences between German and British approaches to attitudes predating the Internet: the British ‘Speakers’ Corner’ tradition of soapbox politics versus the feeling within German political institutions that they “have no legroom for experiments, because they might fail”. In IT terms, he dubs this “the German fear of the beta version”. But as Dowe himself points out, the report is only a snapshot. There is plenty more scope for eParticipation in the UK, Germany and everywhere else.

- Download report in English (pdf, 1.9 mb, 84 pages)
- Download report in German (pdf, 1.73 mb, 89 pages)

The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global initiative to select and promote the world’s best e-content, started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

It is an Austrian initiative to make world leaders aware of the necessity to develop and invest in e-content in order to bridge the digital divide and the content gap.

The award is structured in eight categories: e-government, e-health, e-learning, e-entertainment, e-culture, e-science, e-business and e-inclusion.

Water Cooler Games is a site about videogames with an agenda. It is about games that go beyond entertainment. Water Cooler Games explores the emerging field of games want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment.

Water Cooler Games is edited by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two of the world’s leading videogame researchers and designers of videogames with an agenda.

The access2democracy non-profit N.G.O. was established in Athens and New York by a group of prominent, like-minded world citizens aiming to become a leading international civil society organization in the field of e-democracy and to promote the principles and practice of participatory e-democracy within the global arena.

“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.

“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.”