The Being Heard website has been designed by the UK Hansard Society with the aim of inviting young people to engage with political issues and political decision-makers.

The aim of Being Heard is to build young people’s level of political awareness and participation so that they can play an active role in the democratic processes affecting their lives.

Being Heard is also a consultation space for decision-makers to engage with young people and their ideas, experiences and opinions.

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.

The E-Democracy programme of the Hansard Society, a UK charity that works towards promoting effective parliamentary democracy, seeks to develop innovative ways of using new interactive technologies to reconnect Parliament with citizens and encourage participation in the democratic process.

The E-Democracy Programme’s research explores the potential for interactive technologies to create new channels of communication and participation between Parliament and the people to enable citizens to scrutinise and influence legislation and those who represent them.

Some of their latest initiatives are:

• Citizen Calling – a pilot initiative with the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, where young people can have their say via mobile phone.
• TellParliament.net – open online consultations being run by Parliamentary Select Committees
• im-local.net – an online resource allowing young people and councils to interact and discuss topical local issues using ‘instant messaging’ technology.

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.

The Mobile Democracy blog is dedicated to documenting and exploring political action and mobile media. It is sponsored by the Media 50 Group, a new company aiming to bridge new technology and political action and managed by its co-founder Tim Chambers.

The Serious Games Initiative is focused “on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.”

The website, which is really a blog, was developed by David Rejeski, director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consultancy.

On the Wilson Centre website — which strangely enough doesn’t provide a link back to the Serious Games Initiative website — you can read an interesting article by David Rejeski where he argues that there should be a public sector body to make video games in the same way that PBS or the BBC makes radio and television. This body, which Rejeski calls “Corporation for Public Gaming”, “would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good.” In other words its goal would be “to provide high-quality games, which ‘inform, enlighten and enrich the public.”

Sawyer was also the volunteer producer of the first Serious Games Summit held at the 2004 Game Developers’ Conference. The 2006 Serious Games Summit is “the premier professional conference for the creators and commissioners of serious games, [focused on] the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors”.

(via my business partner Jan-Christoph Zoels and Anne Galloway of Ottawa’s Carleton University)

“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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Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker, a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is part of a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

Games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. Video games also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective.

Featured games:

• Peacemaker (a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)
• Food Force (a UN released game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones)
• A Force More Powerful (a game to teach the methods of influencing or changing the political environment using nonviolent methods)
• Darfur is Dying (a narrative based simulation about surviving in a Darfur refugee camp)
• September 12 (a simple game to explore some aspects of the war on terror
• Madrid (a newsgame about the 3/11 terrorist attacks in Spain)

Read full story (permanent link)

“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.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has recently announced Campaigns Wikia, an effort to bring political discourse to the masses using the humble wiki as the platform.

“Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.”

“[It is] a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.”

“This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.”

“Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.”

- Read Campaigns Wikia mission statement
- Read background article

This focus area of Carnegie Mellon’s InSITeS (Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society) embraces the topics commonly referred to e-government and electronic democracy.

“Although the phenomena overlap, e-government generally refers to IT-enabled service delivery, procurement, and internal government management. Electronic democracy generally pertains to the use of new information technology to facilitate political engagement by the people, whether communicating with official government organs or among themselves.”

“We are concerned with discovering the circumstances under which people are most likely to resort to the Internet as a significant medium for meaningful community engagement, and with developing tools to help citizens identify, discuss, and resolve issues of public policy.”

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.

To speak of new democracies is to refer to two inter-related phenomena, write the author Professor Stephen Coleman and Ildiko Kaposi in the introduction to the report ‘New Democracies; New Media: What’s New?‘.

Firstly, there is the wave of democratisation that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which states as diverse as former Soviet satellites, Latin American military dictatorships and developing African nations came to adopt the formal tenets of liberal constitutional democracy: elections based on universal suffrage; competing political parties; accountability of governments to governed; the rule of law; and basic civil liberties.

Secondly, there is the sense in which twenty-first century democracies are departing from the traditional model of state-centred sovereignty and adopting new forms of substantive democracy characterised by participatory methods of policy-making and centrifugal delegation.

In advanced democracies, these modernising strategies tend to be associated with the collapse of traditionally centralised sovereignty, whereas for newly-democratised states, innovative approaches to policy formation and decision-making are seen to constitute evidence that power has passed from unaccountable elites to the civic grass roots.

In this second sense, the notion of ‘new democracy’ raises important questions about the extent to which governance need be characterised by elitist characteristics that we have come to regard as politically inevitable.

For example, even in the most historically developed democracies, the process of government policy formation and decision-making has tended to operate at some distance (physically, culturally and politically) from most citizens; official information has tended to be scarce and unequally distributed; opportunities to influence government agendas have been limited to political insiders and professional lobbyists; political culture has tended to be exclusive and unwelcoming to the demos who should (normatively) be at the centre of the democratic stage.

Are such characteristics inherent to the governance of mass democracies or might new democracies do things differently? Or, to state the question in socio-technical terms, are there ways of designing democratic regimes in ways that place the demos in a more central political role?

DoWire is your primary source for what’s important and happening with the convergence of democracy and the Internet around the world. DoWire is a free, low volume, moderated blog and e-mail announcement list.

Launched in January 1998, DoWire connects over 2750 experts, practitioners, journalists, and citizens across 80 countries. If you are interested in democracy online – including politics online, new media, e-governance, e-government, online advocacy and activism, citizen e-participation and related topics, then join us.

Democracies Online, the blog/newswire, the wiki (with its UK case studies), and interactive groups are a public service hosted by Steven Clift. They are designed to share information about e-democracy on the global basis as well as connect information-age democracy builders for knowledge exchange.

Open Polis è una community di persone che si interessano di politica e nuovi media. Alcuni lavorano da anni nel campo delle nuove tecnologie, altri stanno nelle universita’ e nella scuola.

Open Polis is a community of people interested in politics and new media. Some work in the field of technologies, others are at educational institutions and universities.

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

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

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

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

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

openDemocracy is the leading independent website on global current affairs – free to read, free to participate, free to the world…