Category: e-Democracy

Can government invoke the Lazy Web? Hmmm. Let’s try. My agency has launched a number of pilot projects in DanmarksDebatten, Denmark Debate, an e-democracy service we offer to all public sector institutions in Denmark, for them to open up for dialogues with their users. The service allows the institutions to do some customisation and simple integration into their own websites.

The Denmark Debate backend also creates a potentially very interesting XML-feed with links to all the debates, categorised by metadata. The feed is in a home-grown XML-format (see the XML schema).

I would like to have RSS-feeds, but for various reasons don’t want to ask the contractor to add such. I would rather have a small perl/php script or something. Any ideas?

It is now more than two years ago Stephen Coleman and I published Bowling Together. Stephen is in Copenhagen for a few days doing a PhD course, but I “stole” him this morning to come and speak to the members of a network of government officials and e-democracy practitioners, and have dinner plans with him tomorrow.

Stephen recently became the world’s first professor in e-democracy, and now resides at Oxford Internet Institute, which is doing a lot of interesting stuff.

Although I try to follow the e-democracy debates, I have basically not been actively working with e-democracy since Bowling Together, so I have a lot of catching up to do, because I understand from Stephen that the agenda has moved on, although much slower than even the sceptics assumed. With the exception of e-voting of course (which many sees as central to e-democracy, but I see as the least interesting part of it …).

On related news: Last week, The Ecomomist ran a special feature called Digital dilemmas, where I found this quote: The biggest decisions about the internet’s future will be political and social, not technological. How true.

I found the economist.com link in a blog entry by James Crabtree, who has some good comments on the article.

My friend Steven Clift asked me to help spread his Rent A Coder announcement about getting help with his Democracies Online Newswire – DoWire.org , so he can serve his 2600 subscribers.

Steve wants an E-mail List/Weblog/CMS Combo, using an open source platform. He has some interesting ideas, and it’s going to be interesting to hear about the bids.

The technology I use here on Slashdemocracy should be able to do most of the job. MovableType, or Gossamer-Threads Links SQL and Forum, for the writing and community stuff, and then I would ask LSoft to host the big distribution list, because I wouldn’t trust a virtual server to handle 2600 emails.

“Weblogs are now mainstream enough that Doonesbury spent a week in October making fun of them, but as political tools they are still in beta release”, Ed Cone notes in Plugging in the disconnected voter: “Guilford County’s emergence as the campaign Weblog capital of the known universe may seem an unlikely turn of events”. Tara Sue Grubb, a 26-year-old real-estate agent and Libertarian who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives, is running a campaignblog. She’s up against Republican Howard Coble, the (outgoing) chairman of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, and has confronted him on his work there. Good luck tomorrow,Tara!

Mark Fiore’s Animated Political Cartoons is not only hilariously funny, but also a wonderful piece of digital craftmanship. The Buzy Bush is a cool play with interactivity tools – notice how it makes the user play along, and then after a while takes over the controls to make a point.

Dave Winer points to the BBC news story: China criticised for ban on Google. Critics are for example Reporters sans frontières. More news on the Googleban.

Besides the democratic rights issues, which I actually feel strong for, I want to point to the fact that China’s Googleban effectively is useless unless they also ban a lot more sites. I don’t just mean the big Google-partners, Netscape and DMOZ and the likes, but also many other sites. Mine, for example. In my links collection, for example, I offer additional Googlesearches delivered via the Google api web service. The user thus never accesses (interacts with) google.com, since my server does that for the user. Unless I’m mistaken, it would be very difficult for anyone from, say, the Chinese authorities to “track” this kind of google traffic.

CivicChat is a discussion board recently launched in Australia, for local government discussions in Western Australia. It “is the Forum where you can have your say on any matter that concerns you in your local city, town or shire, and see what others in your or other local areas are saying. Within CivicChat, you can start your own conversations, organise events or meetings. CivicChat is free to citizens — Councils pay an annual access fee.”
Usage is based on registration, but from what I can see in the indexes, there isn’t a lot of activity around. Yet. I wonder how many members there are, especially on the council side.

In our Danish Denamrk Debate project, which is still under development, we plan not to charge the councils, nor the citizens of course, and generally avoid too much registration, which I think will scare away people. What we also do, and this I think is key to success, is that we go for distributed ownership, i.e., that we make the local councils responsible for the debates in their “zone”. In fact, we will try and go far in this direction, and are building a special web service for allowing the councils and other to integrate the debates into their own sites. XML and web services meets democracy 😉

The Swedish general election is coming up in September. The Valblog 2002, a collaborative blog covering the elections, is almost a week old now, and looks like a promising concept.

Major announcement from Robin Cook today: In the Service of Democracy, the UK Government’s consultation paper on a policy for electronic democracy is finally available on the new e-Democracy website. Congratulations to Karin and Peter!

Accenture: Our Functional Expertise: eDemocracy

They write: “eDemocracy embodies four stages:

• Citizens access to information – providing information about political candidates, issues, campaigns and elections through web sites.
• Decision-making – providing online opportunities for citizens to communicate with, and influence politicians through direct discussion.
• Voting – providing a system in which citizens can vote on issues, ballots, and elections electronically”

What’s the fourth stage?