PEP-NET Summit 2012: Out in the Open (14 May, Hamburg)

In Hamburg, lots of bicycles, sunny but cold.

Rolf Lührs (DEMOS eParticipation) begins the summit, explaining how the EU-funded project PEP-NET is out of “formal” control, but has led to many things that are now happening in Europe as well as today’s Summit. Some general “Open” principles that have been identified, and now need to be tested:

• Open, such as data, participation;
• Collaboration, crowdsourcing;
• Trust by increasing transparency;
• Participants are partners, not customers;
• Empowered actors: people need to feel that they can participate
• Responsiveness to social change: new kinds of leadership are emerging and change needs to be seen as normal;
• Representative democracy, politicians need to adapt.

Carsten Brosda ( Head of the Office for Media, Hamburg State Chancellery)

Hamburg is one of the big media cities, both in terms of traditional and new media. But you can’t just claim to be a digital city, you  have to live  it – the cultural specifics need to be included in the strategies to achieve open government.

Future e-Democracy, London 2010

Future e-Democracy 2010, London snowed in! http://www.headstar-events.com/fdem10/

“Engagingly Different”

Steve Thompson, from the Institute of Digital Innovation(University of Teesside) initiates the conference with a keynote  on an alternative perspective on inclusion.

Involving people is more difficult than you expect as people will not just turn up. Engagement is a two-way street, and it needs to engage both the community and the decision makers. So, digital inclusion needs to consider on the one hand digital relevance, and on the other, promote digital enthusiasm.

Future e-Democracy ’09: London

On 25th of November, the UK’s main conference on eDemocracy brought together the European eParticipation community in London. This article provides a summary of some speeches held in London.

Blogosphere in the US

Will Straw (Left Foot Forward) gave a very interesting overview of the blogosphere in the US, and presented the similarities and differences in the UK blogosphere.

Bloggers have been able to provide a new political narrative, beginning with the Huffington Post which encouraged its readers to go out and act as journalists, thus providing new angles to a story. Blogs are able to keep a story going on for longer period of time (in comparison to the traditional media would usually present the same story for one day only).

The UK Blogosphere experience lags 5 years behind the US, but here too the majority of political bloggers are mainly supporters of the opposition parties. Although there are lessons to be learned, there are cultural differences that cannot be ignored.

Blogs are important as a tool for providing fast replies; their strength lies between the links they can make to other blogs, old and new activist groups and not having anything to loose! They can influence the mainstream media, their audience and community.

The business model behind a blog? Blogs such as the one run by Straw do rely on donations and sponsors (which are listed on the blog), and although a blog is not expensive (these are mainly labour costs), but it is important to keep the costs low.

E-Participation in Marghera, Venice, Italy

The City of Venice (Commune di Venezia) is one of 7 provinces in the Veneto Region. In turn the city has 6 Municipalities located both on the traditional islands and the mainland. Marghera is one of these Municipalities, each of which has its own Council linked to the City of Venice. Marghera is a relatively new area; based on the mainland it includes the commercial port for the region, excellent transport links as well as extensive housing.

In the 1950s the population of the islands was as high as 150,000 people; with the decline of heavy industry and after the floods of the 70s people began to leave, and the population of old Venice is now less than 60,000, with some 20,000 in Marghera. As well as experiencing depopulation in the target area, there has been a rise in the number of immigrants, some of whom feel little connection to local communities and politics.

EU Research Connection, Prague 7-8 Mai 2009

Keynote:

Leading the Way to the Third Industrial Revolution.

Jeremy Rifkin, Foundation on Economic Trends, US.

My Favourite:

Quality in the Communication of Research – Quality of the Sources - Link.

Marie-Claude Roland,  http://www.reflexives-lpr.org/.

Highlights and  Resources:

Link: Publishing Date of Web Pages

Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet:

• Article at www.labnol.org

Assessing the quality of university based research

The Expert Group on Assessment of University-based Research addresses the methodologies used to assess/rank and evaluate the quality of research produced by universities covering a broad range of disciplines. 15 experts from European and non-European countries (including the US and Australia) make up the group and their areas of expertise range from engineering and science, to social sciences, humanities and arts.

The mandate of the group is as follows:

• Identify the various types of users and potential users of measurements of the quality of university-based research;
• Take stock of the main methodologies for assessing/ranking the quality of university-based research with a view to understanding their purpose, scope, uses, merits, limitations and impact;
• Propose a consolidated multidimensional methodological approach, based on robust, relevant and widely accepted methods, addressing users’ needs and interests, and identifying data and indicator requirements. [...]

Read the whole article at EURAXESS.

World's Best Headlines: BBC News

Jakob Nielsen: Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.

It’s hard enough to write for the Web and meet the guidelines for concise, scannable, and objective content. It’s even harder to write Web headlines, which must be:

• short (because people don’t read much online);
• rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article;
• front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
• understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and
• predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click (because people don’t return to sites that promise more than they deliver). [...]

Read the whole article: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

1.PEP NET Online Consultation: Results

The first PEP NET Online Consultation (2-13.03.2009) focused on:

Issue 1 Existing technologies: How can participation initiatives better exploit the ICT tools they already regularly use, like email, online information, online discussion forums, webcasts, podcasts, chat rooms, wikis, blogs, polls and voting, petitions, etc.?

Issue 2 Emerging technologies: How can participation initiatives successfully exploit ICT tools which they do not yet regularly use, including mobile, Web 2.0 social networking and mash-up approaches, as well as mass collaboration, wisdom-of-the-crowd, aggregation and policy modelling tools (such as innovation jams, decision-markets, visualisation, simulation, etc.)?

Issue 3 Channels: How can eParticipation initiatives work with non-ICT channels and processes to promote and exploit better participation and engagement of all types? For example, with traditional policy and political activities through the traditional media, physical meetings, polling and voting, traditional campaigning and communication strategies, etc.

Issue 4 Bottom-up: How can eParticipation contribute to promote and exploit bottom-up beneficial engagement by citizens or other actors, i.e. which arises directly from the needs of specific actors themselves and is not initiated or controlled by politicians or governments? This can include situations both in which the actors’ engagement does not involve any real transfer of influence or power from government, as well as when it does.

Issue 5 Top-down: How can eParticipation contribute to promoting and exploiting beneficial engagement by citizens or other actors in initiatives designed or controlled by politicians or governments? This can include situations both in which the actors’ engagement does not involve any real transfer of influence or power from government, as well as when it does.

Issue 6 Dangers: How can eParticipation initiatives mitigate or avoid the dangers of unaccountability, street politics, mob-rule, take-over by the digital elite or narrow interests, trivialisation, short-termism, too much focus on single issues and too little policy balancing, apathy, lack of trust, etc.

Issue 7 European public sphere: How eParticipation can help promote and exploit a European public sphere for engagement which crosses national and/or linguistic/cultural/ethnic borders?

Issue 8 EU cooperation with other actors: How can EU institutions cooperate with other actors (e.g. the media, civil organisations, social networking sites, the private sector, etc.) in order to beneficially exploit eParticipation? For example, should European institutions join social networking sites, monitor such sites, establish partnerships with other actors, etc.?

Issue 9 EU learning experience: How can EU institutions learn from successful eParticipation initiatives used elsewhere, including from local, regional or national level, from the private or civil sectors, from outside Europe, etc.?

Issue 10 Changes in nature of politics and institutions: How and in which ways can eParticipation contribute beneficially to changing the nature, processes and structures of politics and policy engagement?  For example, including many more individuals and interests (quantitatively, qualitatively and geographically); eliminating, by-passing or enhancing the role of elected or non-elected representatives; changing the relative power and roles of institutions and/or creating new institutions, etc.

The consultation results and further information are available on the  PEP-NET wiki;

for further information about PEP-NET see the PEP-NET blog.

The 2nd online consultation will be in autumn 2009, if you are interested in participating, please contact Bengt Feil: feil@pep-net.eu

 

EDEM08: E-Democracy Conference 2008

eDemocracy: Future, Prospects and Limits?

The last two days of September 2008 saw experts, specialists from a variety of fields and guests from 17 countries to discuss the different facets of eDemocracy, its visions, possibilites, limitations and implications, as well as the tools and media required for it to work. It also raised a number of questions – and even those which were left unanswered will guide the future work of eDemocracy.

The international speakers addressed theory and practice, and included topics ranging from eVoting, to eGovernment, trust, authenticity, participation, learning and including and involving the population.

The conference brought together academics and practitioners so that they could discuss, share and develop new ideas and projects, but at the Centre for E-Government we wondered about the following:

1. 5 words to eDemocracy?
2. The future of eDemocracy in a nutshell?
3. Your favourite eDemocracy Project?
4. Opportunities und risks of E-Democracy?
5. What will the contents of the EDEM2020 conference be?

If you are interested in more keynote speakers’ answers, see www.donau-uni.ac.at/edem, but maybe we can meet up next year to tell us what you think? And then we can also discuss about something that Ann Macintosh pointed out: How will we know when we have success?