e-Democracy

Public net-work

8 years ago
by John Gøtze in

My good friend Steven Clift has released two major articles on “public net-work”. The first is an easy to read introduction to e-democracy, online consultation and the new concept of “public net-work.” The second (Word/RTF) is a slightly edited version of the article he wrote for the OECD detailing the concept of “public net-work”. Steve is also planning a special public net-work e-conference later in September.

Public net-work is an interesting concept. It represents the strategic use of information and communication technologies to better implement established public policy goals and programs through online stakeholder involvement. Public net-work projects have the following things in common:

1. They are designed to facilitate the online exchange of information, knowledge and/or experience among those doing similar public work.

2. They are hosted or funded by government agencies, intergovernmental associations, international government bodies, partnerships involving many public entities, non-governmental organizations, and sometimes foundations or companies.

3. While they are generally open to the public, they are focused on specific issues that attract niche stakeholder involvement from other government agencies, local governments, non-governmental organizations, and interested citizens. Essentially any individual or group willing to work with the government to meet public challenges may be included.

4. In a time of scare resources, public net-work is designed to help governments more effectively pursue their established missions in a collaborative and sustainable manner.

Our DanmarksDebatten is mentioned under “initiatives suggested for future exploration” in the OECD-paper (OK, I admit I told Steve to put it there …).

Steve has some good points. I strongly recommend his articles.

Maybe Steve should join us at CPsquare?

Blogging Vox

8 years ago
by John Gøtze in

If you’re in London on 14 July, I know what you want to do: Attand the Voxpolitics Seminar: BLOG RULE, where James et al asks Can Weblogs Change Politics?. To answer this question, they’ve invited Steven Clift, Stephen Pollard, Pernille Rudlin, and Tom Watson MP.

I’d really like to be there, but can’t make it over to London. If anyone cares, here’s my take on the question: Can Weblogs Change Politics?

Blogs don’t change politics, people do. Mkay? ;-)

Having said that, I must hurry and say that I think blogs are hugely important to e-democracy at large. In fact they’re so important that I refer to a third generation e-democracy, which consists of blogs and what follows.

The first generation e-democracy was stuff like Minnesota e-Democracy. The second generation was when we saw projects like the Kalix R�dslag and occurance of e-democracy companies to run stuff like that.

The third generation e-democracy is distinct from the previous generations by demonstrating a much more loosely-coupled democratic practice.

Tara Sue Grubb got famous when she ran for congress by running a blog, and since then we have seen more and more politicians blogging. In Denmark, we have (at least) Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, our former prime minister, and Morten Helveg Petersen, MP. (Danes: Send me more links and I’ll make a directory of Danish blogging politicians). Although there are some positive things to say about politicians as bloggers, this is not where I see the real news. To get to that, a bit more on the blogging phenomenon.

A blog is a simple CMS for publishing on the web. But the commodified, more advanced blogging tools are also publishing a lot of XML and web service stuff, and sending a number of messages around in cyberspace in cool new ways. For example, when I in my blog use a city name, I can check a button and have the blog tool go and find a map of the city and post it as illustration to the blog entry. I can get the blog to fetch a few related news, a book recommendation, and much more. Some of the XML that flows around also end up in a number of repositories and databases. We have seen many innovative services, such as Technorati.

Enter the Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem: “Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right”.

Basically, we are getting new possibilities for a new kind of communication online, which we could call C2C, Community-to-Community, and related P2C (person-to-community), etc. For example, when I post a blog entry, I can set “trackback autodiscovery” on, and have the blog tool send a message to blogs I talk about, thus making my voice “heard” all over the place.

We have only seen the beginning here. A few predictions/trends:

  • Moblogging, i.e., blogging from wherever you might be, via mobile phone or handheld device. We will see an increase in location-aware systems.
  • Community blogs, like LA Blogs, but much more than just directories.

The Emergent Democracy Paper by Joi Ito is bringing in the concept of emergence to the democracy domain. Well done, Ito-san.

Progressive?

8 years ago
by John Gøtze in

David Fletcher is always good for picking up lots of interesting stuff. One item I found particularly interesting is Network Government for the Digital Age by Robert D. Atkinson of Progressive Policy Institute. This is about the politics of networked government. Atkinson argues that an information-rich economy and societal governance can be transformed in six key ways:

  1. from bureaucratic and rule-driven government to entrepreneurial and flexible government;

  2. from bureaucratic programs to empowered social entrepreneurs;
  3. from top-down control to bottom-up complex adaptive systems;
  4. from bureaucratic solutions to market-enabled solutions;
  5. from information controlled by the bureaucracy to information freely available to everyone; and
  6. from compliance with rules to accountability for results.

Progressive? Well, there’s some inflation in this concept these days … I note that “the national leaders of progressive centre-left governments across the world” will gather in London for the Progressive Governance Leader’s Summit, hosted by Tony Blair. Bill Clinton and Douglas Alexander are some of the progressives.

GeoDemocracy and geogovernment

9 years ago
by John Gøtze in

The geofun is of course also serious business (but apprearently not good business, see below): cyber-chatter is out of favour, will it be replaced by geo-babble, as Guardian writes.

Location awareness is often considered in terms of mobility, and there are some interesting examples of mobility-based services. There is an international workshop about mobility in government in Stockholm these days, and I look forward to hearing what comes up there (I won’t go there myself, but will publish whatever comes up since it’s a GOL-IN-activity).

But location aware devices are going to affect ‘stationary’ communities too. Street Servers, an outline of an open source networked neigbourhood, is about interfaces to real spaces and local communities. The idea is to move away from the idea of intelligent buildings and towards the idea of social interfaces to local spaces. GeoURL made us bloggers put geographical information on our blogs (see sidebar), and I’m sure there’s much more to come in that direction.

It gives new hope for localised discussions, which is a hard business. UK-based UpMyStreet – The real-life guide to your neighbourhood, which is up for sale (also Register, Guardian). I have, not being based in the UK, never actually used UpMyStreet, but am sympathetic to the concept.

I’m going to add a few ‘geoblogs’ (headmap, webmapper.net – what the map can be, and GISploration) to my blogroll.

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