“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.”

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.

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“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

We want to start a new political party that will focus on formulating political agendas rather than fielding candidates for election. The Participatory Democracy Party (PDP) will be a genuine grass roots effort; the party membership, organized into task forces focused on particular areas of concern, will identify problems that the political system can address, evaluate proposed solutions, and define a political agenda to apply the best solutions to the problems. The party’s influence on events, then, will depend on its ability to get elected officials to adopt and implement the agendas it develops. The work of the party task forces will be done through email and telephone conferences, managed and facilitated by web-based technologies. The PDP will be a transparent effort: all party communications will be publicly archived.

This site presents a proposed structure and operational methodology for establishing the PDP.

The conference “Towards e-Democracy: Participation, Deliberation, Communities“ (in short, TED06) will take place from 24 to 26 October in Mantova, Italy.

For the past four years the European Science Foundation programme Towards Electronic Democracy (TED) has focused on the development of methods to address societal issues via the WWW and favour e-participation using the methodologies of modern decision analysis and support to involve citizens and stakeholders in the actual process of decision making: a true step towards e-democracy rather than the e-administration techniques that, by and large, have been emphasised by e-government initiatives. At TED’s heart is a vision to develop methodologies which enable multiple decision analyses to be communicated, explored and, indeed, built over the WWW, thus providing the mechanism by which stakeholders may be drawn more closely into the decision making process.

This conference occurs at the end of TED’s funding cycle and aims both to reflect on progress over the project and to set future research agendas.

The conference will be hosted by the University of Mantova and will be kindly sponsored by the Township of Mantova.

Démocratie 2.0 – La prochaine révolution sur internet sera politique…

Démocratie 2.0 – The next internet revolution will be political…

This blog is designed by James Scott, Associate Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri-Columbiato, to support his research and teaching on the use of the web in government and politics, in civic engagement and public involvement in local and regional governance.

TheyWorkForYou.com is a non-partisan, volunteer-run website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected and unelected representatives in the UK Parliament.

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.

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