The CeDEM12 proceedings present the essence of academic and practical knowledge on e-democracy and open government in a nutshell. Feel free to share this document!
- Original file: Download PDF from Danube University Krems website
The CeDEM12 proceedings present the essence of academic and practical knowledge on e-democracy and open government in a nutshell. Feel free to share this document!
The Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2012 took place at Danube University Krems on 3 & 4 May 2012. Speakers from all over the world met in Krems to dicuss issues related to the digitalisation of society. Find a short summary of the event in this blog post.
… Campus Krems, Spring 2013 …
This workshop was hosted by Johann Höchtl and Carl-Markus Piswanger with presentations of Anke Domscheit-Berg, Reinhard Riedl, Gregor Eibl et al. After an introduction and overview about open data portals in Austria and the cooperations by Eibl, we heard about the LOD2 Project in Serbia (Serbia’s first linked data source). More information on the project can be found here.
Anke Domscheit-Berg presented several advantages of open data visualisation with regards to the different questions that can be answered (e.g. Where: Where does my money go? Where is my subway? Where is my free bike?). The Guttenplag wiki, the phone data of Malte Spitz or Virtual Water (an application providing users with a water footprint of products) were examples of open data visualisation. visualizations of energy statistic data can be found at http://energy.publicdata.eu/ee/vis.html
In the area of data journalism drawing on open data, the guardian came up with a visualisation of the UK riots on a timeline. More visualisation of UK riot data on the Guardian Datablog.
Nowadays people take initiative with leaking documents, collaborating with governments, organising hackatons or mobilising online against a cause. Domscheit-Berg’s talk highlighted trends and examples in the field of open government strategies from both a bottom-up and top-down perspective.
One of the biggest transparency platforms is opencongress.org starting in April 2005 with (only) legislation content. Four years later (April 2009) you could already find more information online, e.g. transparency on bills, money trail and senator voting. A big grassroots platform is mysociety.org offering whole little apps as added service to transparency. All tools on MySociety are open source, providing ready-to-use services. Governments followed the trend for more transparency and interaction with open data portals from 2009 and 2010 and open government initiatives. Governments used social media to talk and listen to people and considered collaborative tools to harness the creativity of people – tactics that have been utilised by companies for some time, but can also work in the government context. Today, some top down open government platforms embrace NGO content (e.g. whoslobbying.com at data.gov.uk)
During the last years we have been witnessing a movement towards more community involvement in open government, e.g. apps for democracy challenges and application competitions. Sometimes communities even take the lead in community public partnerships (e.g. Apps for Germany, which was organised by 3 NGOs and just supported by public governments). Even in the Brisbane “top down” example, hackatons are still organised by communities (GovHack as a non-profit run by volunteers and communities). Sometimes NGOs also fill the gap if governments don’t provide data in a way we want to find it. (more…)
Some of our #cedem12 afternoon Sessions / Main Hall:
With the EU-project WeGov Timo Wandhoefer introduced a toolset that allows policy makers taking advantage of citizen opinions on different topics. Searching for a special topic WeGov should allow policy makers to collect, aggregate, analyze and present inputs from citizens within most social networks by using visualization technologies. As a special challenge for using WeGov Wandhoefer mentioned respecting privacy.