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

Everyone in the UK is to be given a personalised webpage for accessing Government services within a year as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online, Gordon Brown is to announce.

The Prime Minister has previously hailed the potential for the internet to slash the costs of delivering services by reducing paper forms, face-to-face contact with officials, postage, phone calls and building costs.

He is now set to use a speech on Monday to unveil plans to give every voter a unique identifier allowing them to apply for school places, book medical appointments, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car.

Within another three years, the Times reported, the secure site would include a Facebook-style interactive service allowing people to ask medical advice of their doctor or consult their children’s teachers.

Read article

In the 1990s onward, we heard plenty of discussion around “eGovernment,” and how it would put elected officials and public administrators in touch with their constituencies.

Here it is, more than a decade later in the eGovernment era. Do you feel any more in touch with your elected officials and public administrators? Well, I can fire off an email, instead of writing a letter or calling. And I can apply for a fishing license online. And I can download tax forms from IRS.gov.

But eGovernment did not live up to its promise of increasing citizen participation. eGovernment made government a satisfactory online service provider, but can information technology elevate government to the next level — to that of a forum for participation and information sharing? Can the social networking wave that is emerging help bring about more responsive government organizations?

A new report out of Grant Thornton and FreeBalance says the potential is there, for a number of reasons. “Social networking provides governments with a new paradigm: knowledge release rather than knowledge control. This Government 2.0 approach can harness government knowledge to improve results.”

- Read article
- Download white paper

A new report published jointly today by the British, Danish and Dutch governments challenges the way European institutions make decisions and argues that smart EU regulation must mean that businesses and citizens are put at the heart of all European policy-making.

“The report, “Smart Regulation: A cleaner, fairer and more competitive EU” addresses this and shows how smart EU regulation — that improves consultation with “end-users”, such as businesses and consumers, throughout the legislative process — will support growth and recovery in the current economic climate, maximise the European Union’s social and environmental benefits, while reducing burdens and costs.”

Note the use of the term “end-user“:

“We use the term ‘end-user’ to capture everyone who is affected by regulation – both those who incur costs as a result of compliance and those who receive its benefits. In many cases, these groups can often be the same. People who ‘use’ regulation should be able to understand why it is needed, what its benefits are and that the costs it may impose are necessary and proportionate.

We believe that making end-users central to the policy-making process – by being aware of their needs, seeking their views, using these views and demonstrating the value of their contributions – is the best way to achieve this aim. End-users are best placed to provide relevant, up-to-date information, which can improve the quality of the evidence on which decisions are based.”

The Commission, state the authors, should reinforce and apply user-centric approaches when developing new legislation. This will help ensure that the legislation is well targeted and effective and increase the likelihood of compliance.

USER-CENTRIC APPROACH TO IDENTIFYING REGULATORY BURDENS

There are many examples across the EU where Member States and the Commission can draw inspiration on how to seek views and communicate with end-users:

Kafka (Belgium) – Belgium’s Kafka initiative introduced an online contact point, www.kafka.be where citizens can submit comments on existing regulations and make proposals for their improvement and simplification. The proposals received on the website have formed the basis of a reform programme – the Kafka Plan – for the entire Federal Government. Over 200 specific simplification projects have been implemented under the plan, ranging from the abolition of paper accounts to the improvement of home-working regulations.

Burden Hunters Project (Denmark) – The Burden Hunter project applies user-centric innovation techniques to allow users themselves to identify the red tape that causes them most irritation. Civil servants have conducted visits to businesses to see first- hand the regulatory challenges they face. The user-centric approach allows businesses themselves to set the agenda for regulatory action and help develop solutions to cut administrative burdens. Work is ongoing to deliver results on a range of problems within nine areas perceived as particularly irritating, including government inflexibility, lack of mutual obligation and complexity. The Burden Hunter project has led to identifying a number of new initiatives to cut red tape.

Simplifying Together (France) – France has developed a framework that focuses on ‘life-events’ in order to better understand the burdens faced by businesses. These include key points in the life of a business, such as starting up, moving premises or hiring an employee. Using this framework, and through a broad process of consultation with the users of regulation, they have developed a programme to reduce the number of processes, the cost and the time to navigate these events.

- Read press release
- Download executive summary
- Download report

It’s fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at Georgetown University and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy, reports in the Wall Street Journal on the myth of the techno-utopia.

“Our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why”

Read full story

UK government plans to roll out e-petitions across the country could offer people a real say in the democratic process, a conference has heard (as reported by the BBC).

The legislation to make e-petitions compulsory for all councils in the UK comes into force in April 2010.

It could result in a national e-petition scheme and force Westminster to take more notice of people power, thinks web guru Tom Steinberg.

Read full story

We need to think seriously about what digital democracy has to offer, says Bill Thompson on the BBC News website.

“One of the most important thinkers is Will Davies, who cut his teeth working with economist Will Hutton at the think tank The Work Foundation, where he was a lead on its groundbreaking iSociety project.

He is now a research fellow at the Said Business School at Oxford University.

Mr Davies brings Weber, Hayek, Weinberger, Arendt and even Habermas to bear on the question of whether decentralising information through online services like data.gov.uk can offer us good government.

He concludes that while it may provide transparency and even accountability it can never sustain the legitimacy that a democratic state provides. “

Read full story

Lawrence Lessig discusses the perils of openness in government in a long article in The New Republic.

“How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago.

Read full story

danah boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, serving as a Commissioner on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities (in the USA).

She just announced the release of the report, entitled Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.

We begin our report by asking, “What are the information needs of communities in a democracy?” Following this reflective analysis, we outline findings and recommendations, centered on three objectives:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities
• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information
• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community

The report concerns itself with journalism, open government, broadband access, digital/media literacy, skills, civic engagement, local communities, socioeconomic and sociotechnical inequality, education, free speech, etc.

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

Tiego Peixoto, a researcher on participatory budget, sat down with MobileActive recently to discuss the use of mobile technology for citizens to participate in decision making about city budgets. This new and interesting field is showing some promise in several cities in Brazil.

Tiego also wrote an article recently for the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications that makes the case for using mobile tech in involving citizens in budget decisions in their communities.

Read full story

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.”

Read full story

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)

The BBC is to launch a political webcasting platform known as Democracy Live, Helen Boaden, Director of News at the BBC, told delegates at Headstar’s E-Democracy ‘08 conference in London this month.

The site “will offer live and on-demand video from all the main UK institutions and the European Parliament. Users will be able to search across the video for representatives and issues that are relevant to them. They will be able to find out more about their representatives in the institutions and follow their contributions,” Boaden said.

The site will also provide information on how the institutions of UK government work and what powers they have, as well as providing a resource of must know information concerning the issues in the news. “And while this will make for a compelling mix on the site, we also want it to be a shareable resource, with video and text content that users can take and place on their own sites or blogs,” she said.

In her keynote speech, Boaden focused on the role of citizen journalism enabled by new technologies in a modern democratic free press.

“Today, and increasingly in the future, audiences want the news at the time they want it; on the platform most convenient to them and tailored to the subjects or agenda they find most appealing…and for audiences who want to join in, that means including them in the process of making the news.

“The London tube bombings of July 2005 brought the realisation that news gathering had changed forever, she said. It introduced citizen journalism on an unprecedented scale fuelled by the use of mobile camera and video phones. Within 24 hours of the attacks, the BBC had received 1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and 20,000 e-mails.

The technology also gives organisations like the BBC footage that would be difficult to obtain otherwise, for example the BBC is barred from entering Burma but when the protests erupted last year they were bombarded by emails, pictures, texts and video from citizens observing the events.

The importance of user-generated content (UGC) is now reflected in the creation of the UGC Hub -”a seven-day, 24-hour operation at the heart of our newsroom”.

Boaden’s speech is available in full on the BBC editor’s blog.

(via e-Government News)

Going online from a personal computer to access government services has been commonplace in some countries for several years. Now, in Estonia, Singapore and many countries in between, many of those same services are available through your cellphone.

“In emerging markets in particular, governments understand that E-gov services simply won’t reach the masses unless they become M-gov services,” said Gabriel Solomon, senior vice president for public policy at the GSM Association, an industry group representing cellphone operators. “Across sub-Saharan Africa, the fixed-line and PC infrastructure is only available for the elite, whereas the mobile access platform is near-ubiquitous.”

Read full story

When young activist associations met up in September 2008 at La Rochelle, democracy and engagement proved to be further slices of the ‘Eutopia’ cake.

Read full story

Over the past ten years, the Granada locality of Jun has become a cybernetic laboratory for the whole of Europe.

Based on the premise that ‘everybody has the right to the internet’, the city council of this 3, 500 strong town is a perfect example of the optimisation of resources and effective administration: no more mile-long queues to fill out endless official documents.

Read full story

Council of Europe Forum for the Future of Democracy hosted by the Government of Spain and the City of MadridMadrid, Spain, 15–17 October 2008

Conclusions by the General Rapporteurs

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.”