Category: e-Democracy

Tom Riley and his The Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance has published the International Tracking Survey Report, Number Five named E-Governance to E-Democracy: Examining the evolution.

The conclusion:

E-democracy is in its nascent state and while we cannot accurately predict what shape it will take in generations to come, we do know that there will be changes. The key to the success of e-democracy will be the participation and partnership of all the stakeholders in government and the citizenry alike.

For the record: I’m no longer with the Swedish government, as the report states.

Steve pointed to BBC on e-democracy, with him appearing on BBCWorld’s Click Online. He also said this is not supposed to be public until the new year, so don’t click on it until after the holidays.

E-Democracy.Org‘s Technical Committee, which I’ve joined, was picked up by Howard Rheingold. There are some good ideas floating around. And lots of work to do …

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?

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.

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.

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.

News from Joanne Caddy down at OECD: Engaging Citizens Online in Policy Making:

This Policy Brief highlights policy lessons from current experience in OECD member countries and suggests 10 guiding principles for successful online consultation. It builds on the results of an initial survey of OECD Member countries published in Citizens as Partners (OECD, 2001) and a set of country case studies collected in 2002. It does not deal with online service delivery nor with ICT applications to elections (e.g. evoting) although some of the issues discussed here, such as providing information online, may be relevant for both. Finally, it identifies five key challenges for online citizen engagement in policy-making.

Good read. Good advice.

I have just read Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracyby James Crabtree. He writes:

The current British government has got the right question, but the wrong answer. Its question is: how can we use the internet to help people get the most out of civic life, politics, and the way in which they are governed? This is based on a fairly sound analysis of the current problems of democracy. Steven Coleman and John Gotze, in their pamphlet Bowling Together, put this analysis rather well:

“There is a pervasive contemporary estrangement between representative and those they represent, manifested in almost every western country by falling voter turnout; lower levels of public participation in civic life; public cynicism towards political institutions and parties; and a collapse in once-strong political loyalties.”

So far so good. But Coleman and Gotze, and by extension the British government, come up with the wrong conclusion. They seem to think that people are in some way held back from participation. If we made it easier – step forward ‘the internet’ – they might decide to get involved. […]

Whatever the British government concludes is their business. Stephen (not Steven!) and I concluded:

The alternative to engaging the public will not be an unengaged public, but a public with its own agenda and an understandable hostility to decision-making processes which appear to ignore them. By bringing citizens into the loop of governance, opportunities for mutual learning occur: representatives can tap into the experiences and expertise of the public and citizens can come to understand the complexities and dilemmas of policy-making.

I wouldn’t change a word, if I were to rewrite it today. I might want to add a few new chapters that would investigate these issues in more detail, because there is obviously much more to say about these issues.

James concludes:

This should become the ethic of e-democracy: mutual-aid and self-help among citizens, helping to overcome civic problems. It would encourage a market in application development. It would encourage self-reliance, or community-reliance, rather than reliance on the state.

Ethos, pathos, whatever, I can’t disagree on the importance of these values and concerns. But isn’t there more to civic hacking than that?

Is blogging civic hacking? Well, not necessarily, for sure. Is blogging changing our democracy? I think so.

I previously mentioned Joi Ito’s great essay Emergent Democracy. In the final (?) version, Ito writes:

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers should be encouraged to consider their possible positive effect on the democratic process as well as the risk of enabling emergent terrorism, mob rule and a surveillance society.

We must protect the ability of these tools to be available to the public by protecting the commons. We must open the spectrum and make it available to the people, while resisting increased control of intellectual property, and the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must work to provide access to the Net for more people by making the tools and infrastructure cheaper and easier to use.

I very much agree with Ito-san. I’m not so much into all the mobloggfing stuff (mainly because I am gadgetless …), but I like the emergent thinking related to it. Calling it the next social revolution is not how I would put it, however. In my view, it’s a long revolution. And it’s an ongoing thing. I, I’ll be blogging the revolution.

Emergent Democracy by Joichi Ito is the first good essay I have read about blogging and democracy:

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. … Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers will build the tools necessary for an emergent democracy if the people support the effort and resist those who try to stifle this effort and destroy the commons.

We must make spectrum open and available to the people, resist increasing control of intellectual property, and resist the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must encourage everyone to think for themselves, question authority and participate actively in the emerging weblog culture as a builder, a writer, a voter and a human being with a point of view, active in their local community and concerned about the world.

Ito refers to Steve Mann’s concept sousveillance, i.e., watchful vigilance from underneath, and goes on to discuss what blogs does for democracy, and what that has to do with emergence. Very interesting. I’m not sure I agree with Ito’s conclusions, however, but that’s another story.

For now, I’ll follow the debates on Ito’s blog.

Congratulations to Michael Meotti, who was named one of The Fast 50, Fast Company magazine’s annual readers’ challenge, a worldwide search for ordinary people doing extraordinary things. What Michael did is truly extraordinary:

Don’t fight City Hall, inform it: Michael Meotti developed the City Scan project, which puts handheld computers, GPS systems, and digital cameras in the hands of citizens to document street-level conditions that need to be fixed by local government. Citizens help inventory everything from potholes to graffiti and then draft a ‘Contract for Results’ with city officials.

I’ve met Michael a few times, and have much respect for his work. I think one of the times were at the Taking Democracy to Scale conference last year. Speaking of which, I just found out that Lars and Mike have started a blog. Welcome in blogspace, guys! I’ve promptly added you to my blogroll.

More Fast 50: I was also pleased to learn that Tomoye is there. They’re doing some important work:

John Mertl’s software is helping “communities of practice” share ideas within the Smithsonian Institute, the World Bank — even the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2002, his company was asked by the United Nations to help rebuild Afghanistan and promote AIDS awareness in Africa.

Faster, faster.