• They are both initiatives of the public sector (in Spain, private Universities are really a minority).
• They both provide core services that have a central source and whose reliability is based on the legitimacy of that source.
• They both address a large community that is interested not only in getting those services, but in participating in their design, including the transparency and accountability of the whole process.

The central source and need to certify the information generally goes in the opposite direction of participatory design and engagement. The former asks, naturally for centralization, the latter for decentralization.

The fall of transaction and replication costs (the two big constrains of the industrial revolution) make it possible to separate management from participation. It’s like if you could have a football game being played in every player’s living room while still being able to have a game and keep an up-to-date scoreboard and stats.

But, as said, centralization attracts both management and activity to your own platform (the learning management system, the government’s portal), while participation centrifuges activity out to social networking sites.

Simplifying things to the max, my landscape now looks more or less like this (please understand Management in a non-restrictive way):

Education

Government

In my opinion, there is enough evidence that centralization of participation will not work any more. Education is asking for an increasing de-institutionalization and government portals won’t get any participation just because they were built. This leaves out cases I and III as possible approaches to create strategies that try to match management with participation.

The problem with case IV is obvious to me and is about the risks of Cloud Computing which, again simplifying, are twofold:

1. The risks of security and ownership, which are still to be fully addressed and fixed by cloud service providers, and which a public service just cannot afford to leave unattended;
2. and the blurring of the institutional identity, which undermines the main asset of a public institution: legitimacy.

I thus advocate for a mixed solution of keeping your main assets centralized while externalizing all the participatory side (see case II):

• The core value stays “home”: data of the students, syllabuses, data from the government, government plans…;
• Centralized, the core information is legit, certified;
• A centralized management is compatible with a decentralized access: open API and open data provide gateways so that access can be remote but management of data still be centralized, secure, private;
• Your staff has to develop skills to outreach your target while focussing on management, which is your core;
• Your staff has to develop skills to monitor and even capitalize what’s happening outside of your platform, but without needing to interfere in off-core activity;
• Participation is not mediated by management needs or management staff, can freely emerge, and can do it where it pleases.
• And, most important, participation has the fuel to fully engage with all the information possible;
• If communication and information channels are open and work in two-ways, the (virtuous?) circle closes and the cycle starts again.

In my Predictions for Social Media in 2010 I revisited the importance of the ePortfolio and the institutional website. As I there said, I plead for the construction of the (e-)portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

I not only believe they should go altogether and hand in hand, but that their interaction defines different ways of understanding government or education. It always helps me to draw things and see what see what comes out of it:

Case I is definitely what we do have nowadays in most modern democracies: a democracy based on 4- (or 5-) years time span between elections, increasingly ruled by plutocracies bound to the economic powers.

Case II is common in plutocracies willing to be seen as cool. They “engage in the conversation” but, without the required information to feed a true democracy, it finally becomes a dialogue of the deaf. The governments perform populist acts and the masses believe they will be heard by shouting out the louder.

Case III is a genuine approach to openness, transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, without the proper communication channels, data can only be used (then exploited) by the “best” (in an elitist sense of the word), hence the ones that can interpret them and make their feedback get to the governments, the Goverati in its worst meaning).

Last, Case IV, is what we should we be aiming to. I definitely avoided labelling it Government 2.0 because it is surely not the “2.0″ what matters, but its components: participation, engagement, collaboration, cooperation… all in all, democracy in its purest sense.

In fact, it is just another way to thoroughly look at e-Government, which means Government enhanced by means of Information and Communication Technologies. Or, if you prefer it, enhanced by means of Information (data, open data) and Communication (Social Media) Technologies.

I had been asked to answer this question: could we, thanks to the Internet, forget about political parties and let people express their own opinions, debate and vote their representatives directly?

An initial answer to the question would be: well, yes, why not? But, should we?

Instead of providing such an answer — or any answer at all — I tried instead to:

1. explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes were taking place,
2. focus on why these socioeconomic changes were taking place and
3. infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for
4. another wave of changes to happen.

In other words:

1. we have shifted from an Industrial Society to an Information Society (and what each concept means),
2. that this has been because of digitization and Information and Communication Technologies (and other aspects, all of which led to second order factors, etc.) and
3. that we should really be aware of digital competences, the digital divide and the unbalances of power
4. for full e-Democracy to happen.

As can be seen in the presentation, I showed and explained almost 20 cases which I consider either successful or revolutionary or both, cases that have been replicated and will inspire many others.

But I also devoted plenty of time at showing, with real data, that these initiatives are mostly piloted by a tiny minority, my caveat being that we should try and bring more people in — by fighting the aforementioned barriers — instead of keeping on exploring new territories. The reason being that we could find ourselves having replaced a democracy by a digital aristocracy.

I admit that (One of) the bad point(s) in my approach is that it is very economy-focussed, instead of being politics/government based and thus leaving aside many aspects tied to the nature of the subject. On the other hand, I think that the good point is that it makes it easy to go back to the reasons, the whys, and not just the hows. Indeed, the approach is equally useful (as I did yesterday) to explain some changes in education or media.

During the questions & answers session, I really got clever feedback from the audience, while also giving me a second chance to clarify some aspects. Here they go:

• The main aspect to address to achieve good e-Democracy is not the “e-” part, but the “Democracy” part. Difference, for instance, in the USA and European e-politics are more related with the political system rather than the different rates of Internet adoption or digital literacy (which are not that significantly different, by the way)
• Information overload is a problem, which has to be addressed (among other things) with information literacy. Urgently.
• New media literacies will be required too as we learnt to tell true from false when watching TV or FX-intensive movies.
• Editors should be, in my opinion, a keystone in the new Information Society. The problem is that journalists/editors are more concerned about selling audiences to their advertisers or paper to their readers, rather than creating/editing good information and finding out how to get paid for it.

More information

• Blocs&ClubsII: Conferencia de Ismael Peña, by Lize De Clercq
• See presentation online in English
• Download presentation in English ( 14.3 MB)
• See presentation online in Spanish
• Download presentation in Spanish ( 14.4 MB)
• Download video in Catalan ( 149.64 MB)

And I’ll begin with a strong agreement: the iPad is very likely to do more than the One-Laptop-Per-Child, just because the OLPC is doing very little for education, as I think is clearly explained in the Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education monograph. But it is also possible that the iPad will do as little as the OLPC, just because it’s not about devices.

Pieter Verdegem co-authored two interesting articles — User-centered E-Government in practice: A comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction, Profiling the non-user: Rethinking policy initiatives stimulating ICT acceptance — that, along with the aforementioned monograph, can help to centre the debate.

Just for the sake of clarity let us look at some points raised by the monograph authors, Verdegem and DiMaio about access to e-Government (including the “e-” part), keeping in mind that I fully share DiMaio’s vision on what e-Government should be and the conviction that, somehow, we’ll get to that point.

Affordability

This still is a key issue for many people not to go online, hence not to use e-Government services. It is decreasing in importance and becoming almost marginal in higher income countries. But. While a desktop/laptop + broadband connectivity might be affordable, the addition of a second device + the addition of a second broadband service (3G or whatever) is definitely not affordable for many many people.

Yes, I am assuming having both devices and duplication of Internet access services. But I think this will be the scenario in the short and middle run, for the simple reason that the iPad is not a typing-aimed device or a hard-computing-power device, besides the fact that I do not believe in quantum leaps in computer adoption (i.e. in the short run, iPad users will be computer users, not late-adopters).

Skills

Claire from liberTIC recently commented about lack of skills playing havoc on e-Democracy and Democracy at large.

I think the iPad — as its i-predecessors — will make computer usage simple, much simpler than before. But e-Government is not only about computer usage, but much more. As I introduced in Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills and Goverati: New competencies for politics, government and participation, there is much field in the area of digital competences that the iPad just won’t and cannot address. And, as time goes by, technological literacy is less of an issue, which is were the iPad could make a major contribution.

Availability

Which leads to where the Gordian knot is: existence and access to content and services. I fully agree that the iPad can contribute to ease access to online public services through its applications, and I am already looking forward this to happen. But the prerequisite is either open data or open application programming interfaces (APIs). There already exist devices and applications to access online public services. And their successes and failures have mostly depended (a) on the richness of the data they could access and (b) the degree in which they could make an impact or contribute to a change. We take for granted that iPad applications will play magic, but the magic is in the data, not the device (though magic wands always help, let’s admit it).

Awareness and peopleware

But things can exist, be accessible, be affordable and people know how to use them, and still don’t make any use of them. This is, indeed, the tragedy of e-Government (and Internet adoption at large) today in higher income countries: I either don’t know what’s out there or frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. The iPad can raise awareness, and the more friendly user interface will help, but I haven’t seen much success in iPhone educational or e-Government applications being used massively.

I honestly doubt that the problem of e-Government (lack of) pervasiveness is a matter of the device, but of peopleware. If Obama succeeded it was not because of the Internet, but because of “hope”. And the Internet was there to deliver it, of course, and to channel people’s hope back. If Ushahidi succeeded in Kenya it was not because of SMSs and mashups, but because of the basic substrate upon which these were erected. I find AppsForDemocracy not only an amazing initiative, but amazing things in themselves and I look forward the day they will be used massively. But, so far, I have the sense it’s just for us the usual e-Government suspects.

Citrizen security in electronic environments. The case of electornic voting

Jordi Puiggalí, Scytl

Electronic voting is the natural evolution of the electronic count in elections. Two main kinds:

• Face to face: people still go to polling stations, but vote in polling machines
• Remote voting: you vote from home

Advantages

• Count of votes is faster and exact
• Cost saving in paper and printing (though there are added costs, especially in face to face electronic voting)
• Increase of accessibility for disabled people. Also avoids identifying who was the voter (e.g. there’s only one blind voter in town: the ballot-paper in Braille is theirs)
• Flexibility to include last-minute changes
• Support for multiple languages. This, at its turn, avoids errors and avoids identifying who was the voter (e.g. there’s only one voter in town that speaks arabic: the ballot-paper in arabic is theirs)
• Prevents involuntary errors that can end up in spoiled ballot-papers
• Economies of scale (specific of remote voting)
• Eases citizen participation (specific of remote voting)
• Increases the mobility of the voter, as they can vote from anywhere (specific of remote voting)
• Eases access to the voting process thus increasing participation (specific of remote voting)

Security threats

In traditional polling, the voter has a direct relationship with their vote and the polling station, committee, etc. Electronic voting adds an infrastructure layer that implies that the relationship between voter and vote becomes indirect/mediated. This mediation poses 4 security risks

• The digital nature of the votes means that they can be easily added, erased, manipulated, and the privacy of the voter compromised at large scale;
• The complexity of the systems at use, with the possibility of hardware functioning errors, bugs in the software, etc.;
• Lack of transparency, as the technological infrastructures are more difficult to audit (e.g. how can you tell whether someone cracked the system?);
• The introduction of new actors with privileges in the voting process, like system and platform administrators that can have privileged access to the voting process.

Side note: these threats can be extrapolated to the case of health records and many other cases.

How to address risks?

Physical measures

• Avoid physical access to the protected device
• This cannot be done in remote voting, at least not in the whole process

Organizational measures

• Who has access to what
• They necessarily have to be accompanied by monitoring measures (intensive log recording)
• Intensive monitoring can lead to knowing who’s voting what

Logic measures

• Automatic security measures
• Easier to audit
• Logic measures can, at their turn, be attacked themselves
• Logic measures must not interfere (or even alter) the normal voting process

Security services

• Information privacy: guarantee that no one knows what you did (e.g. your vote)
• Information integrity: guarantee that information is not altered
• Non-repudiation: avoid that you cannot deny having done something that you actually did
• Authentication: ensure that the person that claims to have done something is that person
• Authorization: you can do what you are allowed to do
• Auditability: be able to track the system and assess its performance
• Availability:

One of the big differences between circumventing security in off-line voting and online voting is that scalability of the attack is much higher in online environments. E.g. identity theft in the offline world can be easy to do once, but not several times in the same polling station, but if done once in the online world, it is very likely that it can be done again, and very quickly, ad infinitum.

Electronic voting can identify which votes are valid and which ones not. You need not invalidate the whole polling station, but only the invalid votes.

I want to warmly thank Noella Edelmann for inviting me to give a keynote speech in this event. For many reasons.

The first one is that the other keynote speakers are people that I am really willing to listen to, and that very rarely get together in this side of the pond (kudos for the organization!):

• Stevan Harnad, American Scientist Open Access Forum; Universite du Quebec a Montreal, CAN; University of Southampton, UK
• Jochen Scholl, The Information School, University of Washington, USA
• Micah L. Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum, TechPresident, New York, USA
• Andy Williamson, Hansard Society, London, UK

A second reason is that I am an enthusiast about the possibilities of the digital revolution to also revolutionize the concept of citizenship and politics. But I’ve become increasingly upset about the barriers to overcome. Amongst others:

• ¿what has changed — and what has not — because of the digital revolution?
• The digital divide because of physical access
• The digital divide because of skills access and the new digital competences
• The raise of the Goverati: ¿digital democrats or digital aristocrats?
• The concentration of media, of digital media, the echo chambers and the daily me, etc.
• Cons, but also pros of representative democracy
• Pros, but also costs of deliberative democracy and direct democracy

I already dealt with some of these issues in my seminar Goverati: New competencies for politics, government and participation, but I have been increasingly concerned about that after having been working on a chapter proposal about the case of Spain for a Politics 2.0 book within the Information Technology and Law Series series, edited by Wim Voermans, Simone van der Hof & Marga M. Groothuis (the chapter is provisionally entitled Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0 and you can see here the bibliography). So, having the chance to share my thoughts about this to a knowledgeable audience is quite a gift.

Call for Papers

By the way, the call for papers for eDem2010, the 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010 is open, the deadline being March, 1st. I copy-and-paste from the official website the subjects of the conference:

The EDem10 focuses on these changes which can be seen occurring in different areas and which are manifest in different way:

• Transparency & Communication (freedom of information, free information access, openness, information sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks, data visualization, eLearning, empowering, …);
• Participation & Collaboration (innovation malls, innovation communities, bottom up, top down, social networks, engagement and accountability, collaborative culture, collaboration between C2C, G2C, …);
• Architecture, Concepts & Effects (access and openness, user generated content, peer production, network effects, power laws, long tail, harnessing the power of the crowd, crowd sourcing, social web, semantic web, …);
• Different Fields: open government initiatives, eDemocracy, eParticipation, eVoting, eDeliberation;
• Approaches and Disciplines: law & legal studies, social sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, psychology, sociology, applied computer gaming and simulation, democratic theory, media and communication sciences;
• Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches;
• Research Methods.

• What different tools are out there (e.g. blogs)
• Which and how have they been used (e.g. Howard Dean’s blog)
• How can we depict and/or categorize them (e.g. top-down communication, possibility to gather feedback through comments, text-based, Internet based, etc.)

What I am here presenting is the alfa-über-draft version of the preliminary and potential taxonomy that we might be using to categorize online participation tools. And I am openly (and sincerely and earnestly and humbly) asking for comments and examples:

1. Comments on the taxonomy
2. Examples of kinds of online participation tools (e.g. maps)
3. Examples of actual cases of usage of online participation tools (e.g. Ushahidi in Kenya)

Needless to say that the final taxonomy, and list of tools and collection of practices will be shared here. Thank you very much.

A taxonomy of online participation tools

General Description

Name of tool

General category (do we accept more than one category per tool? e.g. Is Twitter nanoblogging and a social networking site? Should we speak about Twitter or about nanoblogging (which would include Yammer, Wordpress’s P2, etc.)?

• Forum, Blog, Wiki, Map, Social Networking Site, Photo, Video, Documents, etc.

Kind of Content

• Text
• Multimedia (Photo, Video, Audio…)
• Application/database (e.g. Ushahidi, FixMyStreet)

Examples of tools

Examples of usage / cases

Field of participation

Directionality: qualitative

• Unidirectional (e.g. web page)
• Asymmetric Bidirectional (e.g. blog+comments)
• Symmetric Bidirectional (e.g. forum)

Directionality: quantitative

• One to one
• One to many
• Many to many
• Hybrid (some of the above in the same tool, e.g. Facebook)

Direction (will depend on specific case?)

• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Both

Participation: level (inspired in, among others, Arnstein, 1969)

• Information: unidirectional exchange of information (Arnstein 1-3)
• Management / consultation / debate: bidirectional exchange of information (Arnstein 4-5)
• Relationship: the exchange of information ends up in specific results (Arnstein 6)
• Desicion: results are binding or have a direct impact (Arnstein 7-8)

Participation: scope

• Government
• Citizenry / grassroots
• Parties / political organizations

Participation: goal

• Accountability, transparency, monitoring
• Propaganda, political message
• Report, complaint, petition

Field of technology

Cost

• Free
• Freemium
• Paid service
• Own development

Hosting

• Online Service (e.g. Google applications)
• (self-)hosted application (e.g. LimeSurvey)
• Both (e.g. Wordpress)

Difficulty / skills (too subjective?)

• Basic
• Advanced
• Expert

Platform

• Internet
• Mobile phone
• Other (e.g. digital TV)
• Crossmedia

Collective Action within Organizations in the Age of Digital Media
Bruce Bimber

This seminar is based on a project by Bruce Bimber, Cynthia Stohl and Andrew Flanagin.

We find new ways to organize people around causes, like Immigration Reform on Facebook. The question is: under what circumstances do we need these new ways of organization, and under which do we need traditional ways of organization (i.e. around institutions and gathering in brick and mortar buildings). What does it mean to be a traditional organization? What does it mean to be a member of a traditional organization in a digital environment?

What does organization-based collective action look like today in the US? People in the US belong to 1.98 organizations on average (twice the average in Europe, 5 times the average in Spain). Thus, we cannot (only) look at memberships, as “everyone” is a member of an organization.

Literature on participation tells who is more likely — depending on personal attributes — to participate in an organization, but not which organization is more likely to be more popular or have more members. So, we should focus on organization-specific attributes:

• Goal agreement: people will participate more in organizations whose goals are more in line with theirs
• Value agreement: people will participate more in organizations whose values are more in line with theirs
• Civic & social motivation: reasons why you join a community (complaint, meet kindred souls, etc.)

On the other hand, we can also find literature on the impact of digital media on participation. But, again, over time the Internet will be less likely to discriminate behaviour as time and frequency of being online, or digital skills become generalized across socio-economic statuses.

Last, traditionally organizations have been classified in discrete categories: civic associations vs. interest groups, centralized/bureaucratic vs. decentralised/horizontal vs. networks, online vs. not-online. Our perspective is different: interaction is impersonal vs. personal, engagement with goals and activities of the organization is institutional vs. entrepreneurial. Combination of these:

• Entrepreneurial + Impersonal
• Entrepreneurial + Personal: e.g. support group, where members decide what to do and on a very personal basis
• Institutional + Personal: e.g. institutions that open chat groups, send personal mail
• Institutional + Impersonal: e.g. World Wildlife Fund, where the institution mainly tells their members what to do

Amnesty International spreads over all categories (skewed towards Institutional + Impersonal), like Greenpeace (more centred than Amnesty International).

To test the hypothesis, surveys run on three organizations, different amongst them in their typology: American Legion, People’s Lobby and The Voters.

Dependent variables: participation in pursuit of group goals via writing, volunteering, donating; identification with the group.
Independent variables: standard predictors of participation, controls for level of participation in other activities, interaction and engagement, organization-specific attributes, technology use.

A first result, though very week, is that being on an entrepreneurial+personal organization makes you more participative in comparison with being in other organizations. Civic and social motivation is also a good explanation for people being more participative. But, in general, results are not very strong (R² below 0.4 for participation, below 0.5. for identification).

Regarding the relationship between engagement and interaction, the extent of within-group variation in interaction and engagement is comparable to that of across-group variation.

The predictors of participation in collective action vary by quadrant across collective action space.

• Entrepreneurial + Impersonal organizations have individualists: people hard to predict, motivated people but with no specific profile
• Entrepreneurial + Personal organizations hold embeddeds, people with high motivation and faithful to the organization, and with high(er) levels of education
• Institutional + Personal organizations have traditionalists, people with high motivation and that are faithful to the organization
• Institutional + Impersonal collect instrumentalists, lowest level of trust with the organization and the values, and the members are involved in many activities for several and different reasons

Summary

• The four quadrants of collective action space are associated with four reasonably distinct collective action types
• Civic and social motivation is the most important predictor
• People’s involvement in other civic activities translates into contributions to collective action mainly for individualists
• Technology use is associated consistently with participation for all four types
• Technology use matters chiefly when it is tied to the organization itself, rather than in the form of general computer skills or time online
• Membership looks somewhat different for different people, as a function of interaction and engagement
• What matters about organiztions is how hey facilitate interaction and engagement, not just their objective structure
• People are less similar than commonly assumed, while organizations are more similar, but to see this we need to look at both together.

Discussion

Q: Can people have different profiles depending on the organization they’re in? Bimber: (we don’t have time series but, so we don’t know, but) it is probable that this happens and, indeed, that people change profile over time. Nevertheless, we do not know and it can be true that what really happens is that people have a specific way of doing things.

Ana Sofía Cardenal: how is motivation measured? Isn’t it “suspicious” that motivation always comes so strong? Bimber: motivation is measured in different ways so to avoid cheating. But there might be some degree of endogenous relationships between variables. But people have different reasons for joining in and these reasons matter.

Michael Jensen: How do we cope with people being that different and nevertheless joining “similar” organizations? Bimber: More dynamic organizations engage in conversations with their members and adapt to their needs/requirements, so there is a feedback that redefines the organization. But still, technology is only a context, there is no core technology.

Derrick de Kerckhove: how are the four categories related with people’s lifestyles? Bimber: It would be interesting to know how an individual evolves through categories as his own personal lifestyle varies.

See also

Below I’ve listed the bibliography that so far I’m using to structure and back my paper. Beyond the bibliography that follows, three events helped much in collecting insights, ideas and find many interesting references. My gratitude to the speakers at these events:

• 5th Internet, Law and Politics Conference: The Pros and Cons of Social Networking Sites
• Citizen Politics: Are the New Media Reshaping Political Engagement?
• 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress: Towards citizenship 2.0?

Tag cloud of the bibliography

A bibliography on Spanish online politics and Politics 2.0

The concept gathered both technological and philosophical (in the sense of behaviours and attitudes) issues. At the technological level, it dealt about the importance of the web as a delivery (of content and services) platform by excellence; data as the core component of all kind of communications and interchanges; software as a service and not a product, then becoming more important access to software than its “physical” purchase; predominance to RSS and associated procedures for the exchange of content; or (while keeping the importance of the web as a platform) the need to create technologies that were portable across devices. At the philosophical level, and both cause and consequence of the technological advances, the spread (and enabling) of a contribution and participation culture by the society at large (and not only by institutions or organized associations); the acknowledgement that anyone could actually contribute with their knowledge and opinion (the “wisdom of crowds”); the raise of a culture of mixing, assembling and aggregating content; and the will to have rich user experiences when interacting online (vs. A passive, unidirectional, monotonous approach which had been common ground in the previous years).

Besides the “formal” definition of the Web 2.0, it has more often been described through some tools and the new and characteristic ways of using them: the blog and the nanoblog, the wiki, social bookmarking, photo and video sharing websites, tagging and “folksonomies”, syndication and aggregation, etc.

After this philosophical approach – boosted by the technological advancements – many have adapted some of the core definitions to many aspects of life. Thus, for instance, Education 2.0 often referred to as a shift from unidirectional lecturing towards a more participatory approach of learning, based in collaboratively creating learning materials, an intensive usage of web 2.0 tools, or openness and sharing of the process of learning, just to name a few. And along with Education, we can find debates around Research 2.0, Culture 2.0, Government 2.0, Journalism 2.0, Enterprise 2.0… and Politics 2.0.

But, quite often, we do not find specific definitions for such concepts, taking for granted that the reader will be able to do the translation from the Web 2.0 to the Whatever 2.0. I here provide my own definition of Politics 2.0, which I needed for a paper I am preparing about Politics 2.0 in Spain:

• Ideas: not closed and packaged propaganda. Ideas that can be spread, shared and transformed by members of the party and partisans, sympathizers and supporter, and the society at large;
• Open data: ideas are backed by incredible amounts of data and information made openly available to the general public, and most time provided with open licenses that allow their reuse and remix;
• Participation: of all and every kind of people and institutions, blurring the edges of the “structures” and permeating the walls of institutions, making communication more horizontal and plural;
• Loss of control of the emission of the message, that now can be transferred outside of mainstream media and diffused on a peer-to-peer and many-to-many basis by means of web 2.0 tools;
• Loss of control of the creation itself of the message: being data and participation available, web 2.0 tools at anyone’s reach, and with minimum digital competences, the message can even be created and spread bottom up;
• Acknowledgement, hence, of the citizen as some who can be trusted (and used) as a one-man think-tank and a one-man communication-media;
• Reversely, possibility to reach each and every opinion, target personal individuals with customized messages, by means of rich data and web 2.0 tools, thus accessing a long tail of voters that are far from the median voter;
• Construction of an ideology, building of a discourse, setting up goals, campaigning and government become a continuum that feedbacks in real time.

I admit that this is neither a usual or a formal description, nor a comprehensive set of characteristics. I believe, though, that it could serve in providing a fair framework to contextualize and explain what’s happening at the intersection of Politics and the Web 2.0.

PS: dedico aquesta entrada al José Antonio Donaire, l’Ernest Benach, el Carlos Guadián, i el Ricard Espelt, en qui no he deixat de pensar mentre l’escrivia.

Deliberative democracy: religion in the public sphere. Deliberative obligations of the democratic citizenry
Cristina Lafont

Which has to be the role of Religion in the public sphere? Which one actually is? Which should it be?

Specially in a deliberative democracy, the fact that people have religious believes makes even more important exactly knowing what are the challenges for democracy of this issue.

The deliberative democracy is a fragile balance between the right to debate whatever subject under some few but strong coercive rules.

Jürgen Habermas: a process of deliberation has to be able to be justified and without coercion. Public deliberation has to include all information available; equality, symmetry and reciprocity to all contributions, independently of their source; absence of (external) coercion; communicative equality; and participants have to be sincere, critic, have no hidden goals, and be responsible for their own opinions.

But not only procedures have to be acceptable, but also the contents of the debate.

John Rawls tries to provide an answer this last question. Thus, contents have to be dealing with the public good (vs. the private). So, what happens with religion, normally out of the public sphere? According to Rawls, Religion has to be left outside, with some exceptions, e.g. values gathered in modern constitutions, basic justice, etc.

But some incompatibilities arise when some citizens might not accept coercive solutions that come from public values but not accepted in their own set of comprehensive beliefs. Indeed, the rawlsian thought could even exclude persons themselves from the public deliberation. Or ask them to forget about their beliefs when entering a deliberative process. Or give priority to public interests over personal beliefs.

Habermas “solves” this by dividing the agora in two: the informal deliberation, where citizens can bring in all kind of beliefs, and the institutional deliberation (parliaments, etc.) where these personal beliefs should be left aside or be translated into “secular” principles (e.g. the ones gathered in constitutions).

Habermas’s solution also has some problems, like treating secular citizens differently from religious ones, sometimes leaving them aside of this “translation” of their principles, for not being as explicit as the religious ones.

Lafont offers come comments. Instead of trying to translate them into general or public reasons, an interesting approach would be to take seriously religious proposals and assume they can be right. Thus, they should be debated as proposals of general or public reasons proposals. And hence be prepared to accept them or refute them, based on grounded arguments. The debate should, then, be more about the compatibility of specific beliefs with the common and acknowledged beliefs (again, e.g. the Constitution) and not whether these beliefs are right or wrong or better than others.

[a debate follows, too complex and rich to collect here]

Closing Session of the Telecentre Forum
Chairs: Sriyan de Silva Wijeratne, Microsoft Sri Lanka

Florencio Ceballos, telecentre.org, International Development Research Centre

One of the convictions behind telecentre.org was that telecentre operators should be trained as social entrepreneurs, instead of hiring people to perform especific tasks.

Providing services – like Drishtee does – was another of the main things that became clear from the very beginning. Knowing, thus, that many countries were approaching last mile issues with public access to the Internet, based on entrepreneurs and services addressed to the comunity, fostered the creation of a global network where all these initiatives could be shared and learn one from another one.

Sheriff el-Tokali

The UNDP began a telecentre network with 3 telecentres in Egypt. A thing that has been learnt since is that telecentres cannot survive outside of a network. A network makes possible sharing services amongts member telecentres of the network or even amongst networks; share strategies and policies, etc. On the other hand, the addition of new telecentres is easy, as they benefit from the experience of the already established telecentres.

But telecentre sustainability does not only rely on sharing services, but in creating new ones. Amongst these services, e-Government services are, arguably, the best option nowadays.

Lessons & good practices learnt from the Philippines Telecentre Experience
Tess Camba, National Computing Centre, Philippines

1. Institutionalizing a national policy: it is worth expliciting and embedding a telecentre policy in the general policy of the government.
2. Organizing one network: the network, a multistakeholder one, is useful to raise awareness, to represent the different interests of the stakeholders.
3. Pursuing a shared vision: to have a community e-Center in everty municipality
4. Employing a multi-stakeholder partnership: engaging the government, the private sector, NGOs, academia, etc.
5. Training compentent Community e-Center managers
6. Promoting knowledge sharing: through the online platform, knowledge exchange conference, Community e-Centre managers exchange programme
7. Putting premium on content & services
8. Harnessing leaders & champions

Ravi Gupta, CSDMS

CSDMS publishes Telecentre Magazine.

There is a major challenge that telecentres face. Their portfolio of services is growing in width and complexity. But they will not survive if the do not have a social part. Telecentres have to connect the dots.

But the added problem to this is: if the governments are not e-ready, telecentres cannot supply e-government services; if the educational system is not e-ready, telecentres cannot supply digital learning services; if the health system is not e-ready, telecentres cannot supply e-health services; and so on with resellers, banks, etc.

The need for knowledge sharing will increase, not decresase, and more as connectivity raises (especially in developing countries).

Final conclusions

• The importance to document everything you do, with a writing, with a photograph, with a video… Testimonials have a strong power and, besides, they help you in keeping track of what you’ve done
• The importance to recognise your failures… and learn from them, of course

Empowering telecentres with appropriate content and services for the next five years
Chairs: Juddha Gurung, High Level Commission on Information Technology, Nepal

Different communities have different needs, thus why we have to adapt content and services to each and every community.

Content and Services in the Telecentre Movement in Nepal
Allen Bailochan Tuladhar, Forum on Information Technology Nepal, Unlimit.com

More than the last mile, now covered in Nepal with coper and fiber, is the last meter: localization of end-user software in Nepali language, the language of the websites, etc.

Services from the telecentres in Nepal:

• Agriculture prices
• Digital literacy courses
• Foreign remittances
• Educaton aides for class 8, 9, 10
• Tele-medicine
• Convergence of telecentre and community radio
• e-Shopping of telecentre products
• e-Haatbazaar
• Rojgari samachar: employment opportunities
• Convergence of libraries & telecentres
• Convergence of schools & telecentres
• Convergence of healthpost & telecentres
• Cyber volunteers (ICT Volunteers)

Drishtee: Connecting communities village by village
Vignesh Sornamohan, Drishtee

Drishtee works toward crating an impact in the lives of rural villages. It provides a kiosk-based platform for services such a s Health, Educatoin, Banking, Micro-finance, rural retail points, rural BPOs, opportunities to provide market access, linkages for physical products (e.g. eyeglasses) etc. now serving more than 14,000 rural kiosks.

For each franchisee and micro-enterprise, Drishtee implements various components for integrating themodule in the existing ecosystem. It provides suport to sensitise the community, undertake needs assessment, customise services, etc.

The model aggregates demand in 20 villages (a “milk-way”), which leads to sustainability, whithin the called ‘Social Enterprise and Livelihood Framework’ (SELF).

Example: lack of health workers? A woman is trained in firts aid and provided with basic first aid kits, like non-invasive diagnostic and pathological tests. Added to this, she is linked at the back with a physician, so that she can get better information or forward the patient to them.

Can content & services empower people?
Angelo Juan Ramos, PhilCeCNet (Philippine Community e-Center Network)

PhilCeCNet is an organization of various stakeholders working towards bringing the knolwedge society to all Filipinos, being its pillars: content development, infrastructure, capacity building and telecentre management.

What empowerment?

• Access: access-utilization gap, cost, literacy, availability of content and services
• Networking: F2F vs. virtual, levels of involvement in content & services creation and provision
• Voice: sectoral issues (marginalized, voiceless, etc.), changes in advocacy, influence in policy, governance, economic participation, me vs. us vs. them, inclusion

To create content, the best approach is to create partnerships for a collaborative, participatory, community-based content development. This should be made combined with including sectoral and gender issues, thematic areas, emerging issues, etc.

The telecentre ecosystem should be expanded, by means of networking, new tools and technology, geographical expansion, etc.

Nevertheless, we certainly need better tools to measure impact, at both the quantitative and qualitative levels.

Case studies of innovative applications and practitioners of the Global Telecentre Movement
Chairs: Mahmud Hassan, Bangladesh Telecentre Network

Telecentres through Community Based Organizations (CBOs)
Raman V. Machiraju, Elister IT Solutions India

In financing services, community based organizations can help bridge the different perspectives that banks and especific customers have. Thus, telecentres can act as business facilitators to financial institutions, by adding in the human factor.

Koslanda Nenasala: Challenges and achievements
Sri Kanth

Hill country disabled group: many disabled people in rural areas cannot even get out from their own homes. Give them a laptop and proper training and they can reach out. Many telecentres provide these skills to disabled people.

SriLankaJobs.net
M.A. Pemalatha & Brimal Prasad

SriLankaJobs.net

is run from a srilankan Nenasala and offers job vacancies in both public and private sectors, including a job seekers database.

One of the major goals is to bring the gap between rural and urban societies. In this sense, both native and international languages are used for the convenience of all the communities.

The project had seed funding from ICTA Sri Lanka, got the e-Swabimani award 2009, and was selected by ICTA for his project replication programme.

Applications have increased from 49 to 619 from January 2009 to November 2009, and it’s having is major impact in rural areas.

So far, CVs have to be uploaded by the managers of the nanosalas in the project (now 5 of them, after the replication programme). This is one of the reasons nanosalas are so necessary for the project, but also a barrier for quickly scaling up and covering the 23 districts of the island.

The implementation of Rural M/SMEs Services using ICT: Egypt and Bangladesh
Rehab Yehia, ICT Trust Fund

Quick win project:

• Short time frame
• Specific objective
• Limited scope
• Quick effects
• Built on previous experience
• Using existing resources
• Pilot project used as a prototype

Learning toolkits are created to teach SMEs in e-marketing, accounting and soft skills. These toolkits (normally in CDs) are distributed to 17 telecentrers in Egypt aiming to reach 1,200 M/SMEs, plus a web portal: Ayadina.net, now considered one of the top-five portals in Egypt for SMEs. The project also includes 4 training rounds with 50 trainers.

After having followed the e-marketing module, many SMEs have created their own websites where they offer they goods.

In Bangladesh the project is implemented in partnership with 30 telecentres and the project is similar to the Egyptian case, diferring only on the type of e-services provided.

Building capacity among telecentre operators for sustaining telecentres
Chairs: Latha Pillai, Indira Gandhi National Open University

Basheerhamad Shadrach, telecentre.org Academy, International Deverlopment Research Centre

We have seen a shift from training to learning. Even children challenge the educational system to turn it into a learning system. This shift, if formalized, would also help in recognizing experience as learning, and give credit to it.

But, what kind of learning for telecentre operators, network operators, (digital) skills trainers, etc.? e-Learning? blended learning?

And how should the curriculum be shaped? formal? informal? In any case, the content has to be shaped towards the learner’s environment, not the teacher’s.

The way we design credit is also very important. Not only as recognition, but also as a means to transfer credits from one place to another, be it geographically (from one academy to another one) or from different levels of the educational track, that is, from an academy to higher up to the University.

Building Capacity among telecnetre operators for sustaining telecentres: The ATN’s Experience
Jose Avando Asles, Association of Telecentre Network

1,265 telecentres operated by ATN, with 28,700 users a day; 861,000 monthly; 10,335,000 yearly (source University of Brasilia).

Courses offered to telecentre operators: digital literacy, microsoft curricula for community learning, telecentre management course, digital entrepreneurism course.

Telecentre management course: online course, 60h

• Information and business telecentre
• Telecentre sustainability plan: how to treat telecentres as social enterprises that need their own funding
• Telecentre financial planning
• Marketing as a management tool
• Telecentre and distance learning

Digital entrepreneurism course, online course, 60h

• Basic Internet
• Entrepreneurism
• Managing business
• Working in net
• The use of Internet in business

During 2009, 643 people attended the Telecentre Management course and 484 the digital entrepreneurship. Also 30 operators from Mozambique followed the courses online.

Current status and future challentes of telecentre.org Academy of Sri Lanka
Harsha Wijeyawardhana, Univeristy of Colombo School of Computing

The Telecentre.or Academy of Sri Lanka was formed on 7th February 2009 at the Nenasala Convention. It was designed to enhance the committment that the government had already acquired with the Nenasala network.

The academy is a multi-stakeholder partnership, with academics, member organizations, non governmental organizations, etc.

The academy has already set up an e-learning platform based on Moodle and is now uploading all the content to the site, open for everyone. This platform, indeed, will host the whole learning management system (LMS) for the Global Academy.

ThaiTelecentre & its capacity building?
Kamolrat Intaratat, Thaitelecentre.org Academy

The Thai telecentres are normally based on their own resources, being community autonomous e-centres, being the main strategy networking and collaborating at the local and national level.

Being autonomous, e-commerce is really a goal both for e-inclusion and sustainability. Hence, courses (3 levels) in e-commerce is one of the key training strategies of ThaiTelecentre.org.

The Thai academy is tied to STOU (People Public Open University) and is demand driven, thus issuing any kind of certificate that is needed.

On the other hand, other courses are already being considered, as the MBA in Social Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the key to sustainability
Ashis Sanyal, Department of Information Technology, India

The sustainability of the telecentre relies heavily on the telecentre operator’s capacity: you are not a self-employed person, you are an entrepreneur.

Telecentres aim to stimulate and respond to the needs of the community. Otherwise, they remain cybershops. Telecentres should be service oriented.

Requierd to start a telecentre:

• Develop a business idea
• Conduct a survey for community needs
• Identify a target service
• Crate business plan
• Plan for sustainability

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: how to retain the valuous human capital built with these courses? Several speakers: Well, part of the agenda is also help the telecentre operators to climb up the professional ladder, so that they are hired in banks, corporations, etc. So, not only it is not a problem that trainees leave the telecentre, but a most wanted outcome. On the other hand, many of them will stay linked to the telecentre movement, legitimizing it with their own experience.

Aminata Maiga Fofana: actually, a way not to decapitalize the telecentre is internship and inner promotion, i.e., an expert user is promoted as an intern and supervised by the manager of the telecentre. If the manager leaves, the intern is promoted as the new manager and a new user is promoted as an intern. And so on.