ICTlogy

Notes from the EDem10 — 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010, at the Danube-University Krems, and held in Krems, Austria, on May 6th and 7th, 2010. More notes on this event: edem10.

Communications: Transparency & Governance

European Citizens’ Initiative
Alexander Balthasar

Even if petition initiatives are interesting, there still is a very tiny minority that participate in any kind of petitioning, be it online or offline. Indeed, people do have the right to write letters to their governments or their representatives and actually nobody does.

[the speaker assumed that everyone at the audience had read his paper, included in the book of proceedings that was delivered yesterday, and based his speech upon that assumption — I wonder how many people could easily follow his reflections and without the help of visual support…]

Communication without borders
Evgeniya Boklage

The political blogosphere is about political blogs dealing with political issues, from a professional or non-professional point of view.

Public sphere: open communication system, based on exchange of opinions, free type of participation, and that includes three functions: transparency (input), validation (throughput) and orientation (output).

Transparency requires openness. But transparency is not about journalism transparency, as transparent journalism can be embedded in a non-transparent (political) system.

Is the blogosphere a significant asset to the public sphere or is it information overload? Is the blogosphere citizen empowerment or is it merely a symbolic tool?

How can blogosphere enhance transparency?

• Media-watchdogs
• Shed light to obscure topics
• Observation of mass media, the political system and the society
• Navigation, creation of an embedding context, providing additional materials, raise awareness on immediate and noticeable impact
• Access to the public discourse
• A tribune for NGOs, advocacy groups and politically driven citizens

Throwing the Sheep’s Long Tail: Open Access
Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek

New Journal of eDemocracy (JeDEM), which will be an open access journal.

We can find a close relationship between open access publishing and e-democracy and transparency.

We can now publish all the information we can without anyone’s permission.

We have to force a policy change where openness is the default, and closeness the option you might choose.

Other reactions on this session

• EDem10 – Day 2 – #2
• Towards European Citizenship?
• Political Blogs and Transparency
• Open Access to Scholarly Information

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