The aim of the eDemocracy.co.nz research project is to examine the impact of using ICT to facilitate and influence the democratic process in a regional community in New Zealand, namely Waitakere City. Its final aim is to develop a framework for eDemocarcy driven by the needs of citizens.

Specifically, this research intends to:

• Observe and document the processes used within a community for engagement, consultation and development between council, community and businesses and the extent to which this is facilitated and influenced by the use of ICT;
• Identify the normative conditions for engagement and electronic engagement that are required in order to establish an emancipatory framework that could lead to a shift in the locus of power within the context of local (and potentially national) governance;
• Define a typology and vocabulary to describe the role of ICT in the processes of democracy, government and governance within the context of the research. This is required to ensure that the study is grounded in a commonly understood and clearly articulated context.

DEMO-net is a Network of Excellence project funded under the European Commission’s sixth framework programme: Information Society Technologies. The project started 1 January 2006, will be funded for 4 years and has a detailed workplan for the first 18 months.

The overarching objective of DEMO-net is to strengthen scientific, technological and social research excellence in eParticipation by integrating the research capacities of individuals and organisations spread across Europe. The intention is to advance the way research is carried out in Europe with respect to quality, efficiency, innovation and impact to overcome the currently fragmented approach to eParticipation in this important European research area. The network with this overall objective will provide a major contribution to the strategic goals set by the European Council.

The project partners are Aalborg University (Denmark); Agentura pro Evropske Projekty a Management (Czech Republic); Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy); Copenhagen Business School (Denmark); County of North Jutland (Denmark); Fondation National des Sciences Politiques (France); Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung (Germany); Institut für Informationsmanagment Bremen GmbH (Germany); Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece); Napier University (UK); Örebro University (Sweden); Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia); University of Bergamo (Italy); University of Helsinki (Finland); University of Iceland (Iceland); University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany); University of Leeds (UK); University of Macedonia (Greece); and Yorkshire and Humber Assembly (UK).

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.

How can we put the user of public eServices in the center of the designing and delivery of online public services and content?

The EU’s eUSER project wants to stimulate the availability and usage of useful and easy to use online public services.

The focus will be on the needs of citizens as users of online public services in their interactions with public administrations in general, in the management of their health and in furthering their education and developing their skills.

The project will prepare a state-of-the-art resource base on user needs in relation to online public services and on user-oriented methods for meeting these needs. It will then use this resource base to actively support the IST programme, projects, EU policy and the wider European Research Community to better address user needs in the design and delivery of online public services.

The project website already provides some very interesting statistics, country briefs and reports. Incidentally, the project is run in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada.

Read also this feature article, entitled “What users really want from online public services”, published on the IST Results website.

“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.

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.”

Kitchen Cabinet is a project initiated by the UK Design Council to design and prototype new systems of interaction between (UK) MPs and constituents and to create an open resource of ideas, suggestions and best practises that MPs can use to strengthen the connection between people and politicians.

Kitchen Cabinet starts with the constituent’s perspective. The Design Council has been “listening to the perceptions and experiences of constituents in North East and South East England” and they are “in the process of identifying a number of design opportunities that MPs can use to improve their relationship with local voters”.

The findings from this initial stage of research with constituents can be downloaded here:

• Download project summary presentation (pdf, 964 kb, 11 pages)
• Download complete user research report (pdf, 1.71 mb, 107 pages)
• Download user research summary film (mp4 file, 55 mb, 10 min.)

Access-eGov (Access to e-Government Services Employing Semantic Technologies) is a project partially funded under the IST Programme of FP6 (eGovernment research). A consortium consisting of eleven partners from five countries (Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Egypt) led by the Technical University of Kosice will carry out the project between January 2006 and December 2008.

Access-eGov aims at increasing the accessibility of public administration services for citizens and business users by supporting the interoperability among existing electronic and “traditional” government services.

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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.

voi siete qui è il primo strumento del progetto openpolis, per una politica liberamente accessibile, modificabile e migliorabile dalla comunità degli utenti.

Un intervento permanente nella cosa pubblica, di controllo e influenza sulle scelte politiche.

L’idea è dare uno strumento che permetta a tutti di confrontare i programmi dei partiti su 25 temi fondamentali.

I prossimi strumenti saranno progettati per permettere il monitoraggio comunitario, per ognuno dei 25 temi, delle posizioni di tutti i partiti nel corso della prossima legislatura (prima delle elezioni hanno detto questo, dopo hanno fatto…).

Tutti i progetti di openpolis sono geneticamente open publishing, open content, open source creati e moderati dalla comunita’. Per saperne di piu’ vai su openpolis.

L’idea del progetto openpolis, di cui voi siete qui è il primo strumento, parte dai soci dell’associazione democrazia elettronica e partecipazione pubblica.

Poi si e’ allargata a un gruppo di persone che si interessano della politica e di nuovi media. Alcuni lavorano da anni nel campo delle nuove tecnologie, altri stanno nelle universita’ e nelle scuole. Tutti condividono i principi del progetto. Siamo una comunita’ che vuole crescere, in fretta.