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.”

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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)

The UK government is keen for local government to harness technology to revolutionise its services; but a culture change is needed first, says The Guardian newspaper.

The government is providing ever more pilot schemes and opportunities to engage but increasingly fewer people believe that “getting involved” is a good use of their time.

This results in the same people who are already active citizens being offered many more opportunities to engage, whereas the individuals who have not engaged are not benefiting from these new opportunities. So just because new channels of engagement are built, they will not necessarily be used by new participants.

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The Economist has published a special report on technology and the public sector.

Why is it, they ask, that business succeeds on the web and government mostly fails?

In the leader article, they argue that the three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.

Last week, the UK think tank Demos launched the Everyday Democracy Index (EDI).

The EDI is an original and innovative tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries beyond the ballot box and across many different dimensions. That includes the formal dimensions of democracy, like procedural rights and election turnout. But it also includes 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 first index covers 25 EU countries.

To see the results and read the pamphlet, visit the interactive website.

Management guru Don Tapscott, the co-author of best-seller “Wikinomics”, wants to teach governments to harness the power of the Internet to reinvent democracy.

Tapscott is an evangelist for Web 2.0, the second-generation Internet based on participation through social communities such as Facebook and MySpace, participatory sites like free encyclopedia Wikipedia, and blogs.

In “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” published this year, he and co-author Anthony Williams dared big companies to reveal their trade secrets on the Web in a gamble to collect the ideas they need from people outside the firm.

Now their thinktank, New Paradigm, is starting a project to involve governments, non-governmental organizations and citizens around the world to revitalize the public sector.

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Tiago Peixoto sent us a link to this report presenting the results of a joint OECD-World Bank stocktaking of social accountability initiatives in OECD countries. The report which was written by Peixoto, together with Joanne Caddy and Mary McNeil is part of OECD’s efforts to identify emerging trends and develop policy lessons for countries seeking to build more open, accountable and responsive government.

OECD countries have done much to enhance government openness and encourage citizen engagement and participation throughout the past two decades.

Although countries now understand that a whole-of-government perspective is necessary to ensure that system-wide impacts are considered, planning and implementation issues remain. This stocktaking of social accountability initiatives aims to collect information about existing initiatives and country experiences, in an effort to help countries meet these challenges while building more open, accountable and responsive government.

This exercise generated 40 templates detailing social accountability initiatives in 27 OECD countries, and the European Commission. Cases were selected based on focus, level of government, and transferability of policy lessons. The group as a whole illustrates the wealth of innovative practices currently available, and provides a rich resource for practitioners.

Several cases explored the use of online tools to enhance public scrutiny and engagement:
- Canada: Online Pre-Budget Consultation (p. 44)
- Denmark: Danmarksdebatten [currently part of Borger.dk] (p. 55)
- Germany: Online Dialogue Participatory Budgeting (p. 72)
- Hungary: e-Games (p. 81)
- European Union: e-Agora (p. 164)

- Full abstract
- Download publication (pdf, 1.2 mb, 196 pages)

A new website for young people has been launched by West Sussex County Council aimed at giving them vital information and a voice for their concerns.

The front page of www.yourspacewestsussex.co.uk also has the first details of how young people aged from five to 19 will soon be able to apply for a free ‘3in1′ card that will give them cheaper travel on the buses, an instantly recognisable ‘proof of age’ and discounts with retailers.

The ‘YourSpace’ website also contains information and advice for young people on a wide variety of issues such as bullying and health.

There is also a link to new-look pages for the West Sussex Youth Cabinet, information about clubs, holiday activities, and dance nights for the under 18s.

There will be regular quick polls to find out what young people think about major issues of the day. The first is about the July 1 ban on smoking in public places.

Read full story [eGov monitor]

YouScotland.com is not a political party, it is a citizens’ movement aimed at influencing the political process.

With elections pending to Holyrood and at Council level on Thursday, May 3rd, electoral politics will inevitably dominate the next few weeks. But there will be another 204 weeks before there are new elections to these bodies. It is then we believe youscotland.com will come into its own, irrespective of the results on 3rd May - an online citizen’s voice that will hold the politicians we elect on 3rd May to account.

But we do believe we can have a here and now influence by informing and exposing where parties, politicians, the media and others are clearly “at it”, and we will do so without fear or favour. We are in nobody’s pocket, though we hope we are on the right side.

Children will be able to find out about Government, public services and the world around them in a fresh, fun and informative way through a new website launched today.

DirectgovKids aims to get children from five to 11 engaged with some of the areas of Government that have an impact on their lives, and to help them learn about and understand the society they are growing up in.

The site is designed to look like a revolving globe, with interactive buildings that children can investigate including: a Town Hall, a Police Station and a School. There are online activities and exciting games, as well as animations and slideshows. New areas are being added all the time and include a Health Centre, a school council voting activity and a special area, where children can have a ‘virtual vote’ on issues that affect them.

Read press release

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.

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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?

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‘Digital Dialogues‘ is an independent investigation into the use of online technologies to promote dialogue between the UK’s central government and the public.

The Digital Dialogues pilot is an initiative established by the Democratic Engagement Branch in the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA).

The Hansard Society’s eDemocracy Programme was commissioned to administer ‘Digital Dialogues’ and produce the case study evaluations. The Hansard Society is an independent, non-partisan educational charity.

Phase One of ‘Digital Dialogues’ took place between December 2005 – June 2006. The interim report released in December covers Phase One and contains case studies and draft guidance from that phase.

Six case study evaluations were completed in Phase One, involving a cross-section of central government agencies, departments and ministerial offices. The case studies used web-based applications, including blogs, forums, surveys and webchats.

Evaluations were generated through analysis of site statistics, interviews with case study owners in government, and surveys with registrants and site users.

Phase Two of ‘Digital Dialogues’ is scheduled to be conducted between August 2006 – February 2007. It provides an opportunity for longitudinal evaluation of case studies to test the guidance created following Phase One. In addition, phase two will make available applications that are beginning to see mainstream use – wikis, podcasting, file-sharing directories, audio-visual blogs, mapping software, virals. New case-study leaders will also be encouraged to combine applications – for example, converging polling software with forums, or photo-sharing with mapping tools. Any applications will be offered the opportunity to make use of one or more of these platforms in isolation from or in parallel to conventional, offline techniques.

The report from this phase is scheduled for April 2007.

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.”

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- Read full story (versione italiana)

Designing for civil society, a blog maintained by British writer and consultant David Wilcox, features some interesting posts lately.

“Making e-democracy part of the everyday - even if that’s YouTube rules” is the title of one of the comments he wrote about the eDemocracy 2006 conference.

The comment spotlights Molly Webb, web manager at Demos who recently won an award for their site; Jo Twist, a senior research fellow at IPPR, where she is heading up their Digital Society and Media programme; and Twist’s colleague Kay Withers, who is working on Emerging Local Media and Citizenship in a Converged Digital Society.

Webb feels that “the main e-democracy focus on politics, government and citizens didn’t fully acknowledge all the activities people engage in online to express their social concerns and aspirations.” “Politics,” she says, “is on the street - outside Whitehall.”

Twist argues that “E-government shouldn’t just take offline processes and digitize them. We should be thinking about how the trends online are opening up new possibilities for communication and collective efficacy.”

Withers raises a similar issue: “As the idea of handing down power from Whitehall to the town hall, to citizens and local communities gains currency, the question which remains unanswered is how digital media and technologies can work more effectively at local levels to represent, enhance, and support real needs, as well as amplify voices and increase participation in decision making.”

The post also contains videos of Webb and Twist.

More articles and videos related to the eDemocracy 2006 conference are linked from this summary page.

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.

Tony Blair’s outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a “crisis” in the relationship between politicians and voters, writes Brian Wheeler on BBC News Online.

Matthew Taylor - who stressed he was speaking as a “citizen” not a government spokesman - said the web could be “fantastic” for democracy.

But it was too often used to encourage the “shrill discourse of demands” that dominated modern politics.

He was speaking on the day Mr Blair carried out an online interview.

Mr Taylor said Mr Blair’s online grilling from voters - and other initiatives such as environment secretary David Miliband’s blog and Downing Street’s new online petition service - showed the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.

But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to “solve problems” rather than simply abuse politicians or make “incommensurate” demands on them.

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An online ideas store to help cultural websites stand out from the crowd has been launched by Culture Online, part of the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), reports the eGov Monitor.

Called ProjectsETC, the new site aims to encourage information-sharing between institutions and focuses on the overlapping areas of education, technology and culture.

The site - www.projectsetc.org - includes case studies, practical guidance and comment pieces about real issues facing the cultural sector in the digital age.

Subjects covered include the truth behind web statistics, search engine optimisation and how to make websites accessible. The new site - part toolkit, part confessional and part advice centre - aims to help professionals working on interactive projects.

A series of podcasts has also been launched, exploring the issues behind the creation and management of digital resources.

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