New ways for policy-makers to interact with citizens through open social network sites – a report on initial results Matthew Addis, IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton, UK
WeGov aims at using social networking sites (where the people is) to engage citizens in two-way dialogues as part of governance and policymaking processes.
Several issues are raised, though, concerning security, privacy, digital identity, hacking, masquerading, bugs and system malfunctions, etc.
So far, though, it seems that social networking sites do offer plenty of potentgial for improved interaction of plicy makers and community, and they are complementary to other models. Notwithstainding, care is needed on what’s legally acceptable, risks need being assessed. On the other hand, there is a high dependency on the major actors (Google, Facebook and other SNS operators). Last, many technical challenges have to be overcome before real dialogue can take place.
Discussion
Q: Should politicians and/or public servants take part in social networking sites? Are them an appropriate place where to engage in a conversation? A: These issues are taking into account in the project, though no results are available at this moment. Notwithstanding, SNS can be used to create only-politicians workgroups, so they can work amongst them in a new environment without “third parties” peeking in.
Q: Isn’t that a big brother approach to policy making? Are SNS only used for surveillance but not for listening? A: Of course it depends on the usage.
Analysing e-consultations with the help of Computer Assistance Aude Bicquelet, London School of Economics (LSE)
Text mining is the process of extracting information in large corpora with the aim of identifying patterns and relationship in textual data. Can text mining methods help the analysis of large corpora such as e-consultations?
Alceste software was used to explore petitinons and comments from the citizens. After a first scan, cluster analysis was performed to try and isolate groups of terms and infer from them concepts/meanings.
Text mining methods help in categorization of data, reduction of information, visualization to help and disentangle complex and prolific data, high velocity of analysis.
On the other hand, there are some risks like points or issues missed by the algorithm, missing data, insensitivity to meaning and context, etical issues related to privacy or confidentiality, “dehumanization”, non-awareness of participants being a matter of research, etc.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: Though there might be a risk of decontextualization, text could also be mixed with other data (e.g. on the author of the text) and thus reintroduce context within the equation. Would that be possible? A: Yes, this is definitely an option.
Q: Text mining can be used for “sentiment mining”.
Q: How are these findings used? A: They feed back the whole participation process and they inform the people designing the systems so that they can improve them.
Surfing the Net: a pathway to political participation without motivation? Rosa Borge and Ana Sofía Cardenal, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute IN3, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona
Goals of the research: To investigate the relationship between internet motivation and political participation, and to see whether the use of Internet changes the importance given to motivation.
The literature is not conclusive, and both positive and negative impacts have been found in Internet over political participation in the literature.
The main drivers of political participation are resources, psychological involvement and recruitment networks. Does the Internet reduce the importance of motivation (psychological involvement)? Does the Internet has any impact on it? When participation is not so costly (due to the Internet), maybe political interest is not so important, as participation is almost costless.
(H1) Use of the Internet will not cause the effect of motivation to disappear, but digital skills may actually be a barrier. (H2) Browsing aimlessly on the Internet and being contacted online will increase the probability of online participation.
First results show that political interest and political skills have a direct effect on online political participation. Specifically, having internet skills does have a direct effect in participation, though it will not make political interest disappear as a reason to participate.
There also is a relationship between browsing aimlessly on the Internet and being contacted online and an increase in online political participation.
[Own ramblings: Pippa Norris stated that citizens were increasingly engaged in “actions” rather than “ideologies”. Isn’t that the next step, where “action” is substituted by “casual politics”? Is there still a role for deliberation? We’re witnessing transition fr endorsement of ideas, to participation in actions to casual politics on the run. Seems like e-politics is less of the Habermassian e-agora and more about e-herding.]
Civil Society and ICTs: Creating Participatory Spaces for Democratizing ICT Policy and Governance in the Philippines Ian Jayson Reyes Hecita, Florida State University
Goal of the research: analyse the state of Civil Society Organizations (CSO) in Philippines.
Context: failure of institutions, lack of capacity of government, democracy dominated by the elite.
Thus, CSOs are raising many relevant issues in Philippines related to ICTs and society.
But government receptiveness on CSOs can depend on leadership, on tapping government “champions”, the political attractiveness of the policy issue, and the effectiveness of engagement will be more viable at the executive level than at the legislative level. It will also depend on the openness/receptiveness/political will of government agencies to CSO participation, on the level of institutionalization of CSO participation, the resources of CSOs and capacity and skills to engage the government, the critical mass in their basis and policy audience, the need to develop consumerism, their capacity to carry on research and, of course, the legal and regulatory framework.
As a conclusion, CSOs may have a limited impact in terms of influencing policy outcomes, but they may have an important one in brining relevant topics on the table.
The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany Andreas Jungherr, Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg Germany
A platform where anyone can create a petition and invite others to follow, diffuse and, of course, endorse it. The difference is that several ways of participation are allowed and their evolution can be tracked.
Several examples are portrayed, being the “No indexing or blocking of websites” the more popular, but not all of the topics were Internet-related and they still got a lot of signatures. Notwithstanding, the number of signatures per petition does follow a power curve, that is, there is a long long tail of petitions thata get very low attention, while a few of them get highest rates of attention. And same happens with the users: a very small number of users signed a large amount of petitions, while most of the users just signed a few of them [curious because users could only endorse a petition, not vote for or against it].
Typologies of users (number of users):
New Lobbysts (269): vote intensivelly and in a long period of time.
Hit and Run Activists (235): voted many related issues, but in just a couple of sessions.
Activist Consumers (80,278): voted several issues that were not related amongst them.
Single Issue Stakeholders (414,829): voted just a few issues.
Broadening participation through E-Petitions? Results from an empirical study on petitions to the German parliament Ralf Lindner, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), Department of Emerging Technologies, Germany
The research aims at analysing different e-petitions and see how e-petitioning affects citizenship participation, after the Bundestag’s e-petition system was set up in 2005. The reform of the petition system has six key elements: the introduction of online submissions, the creation of public e-petitions, co-signatures online, online discussion forums associated with each public e-petition and obligatory public meetings of the petitions committee with petitioners who collect more than 15,000 signatures.
The system has been growing in usage since 2006 and now reaches almost 25,000 e-petitions and public e-petitions, and with more than 3,000,000 of signatures supporting e-petitions and public e-petitions.
Results show that e-petitioning does not seem to change a lot the habits of citizens, as those who participated online were also the ones that used to participate offline, that is, the participants in the e-petitioning system were the ones politically more engaged than the general public. Thus, it failed to attract underrepresented groups. Indeed, gender and socio-economic biases are exacerbated.
e-Petitioning and Representative Democracy: a doomed marriage? – Lessons learnt from the Downing Street e-Petition Website and the case of the 2007 Road-Tax petition Giovanni Navarria, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk to allow people to create new or sing up for existing petitions addressed to the Primer Minister’s cabinet. The Road Tax petition was created by Mr. Peter Roberts in November 2006 and was sent just to some 30 friends: 3 months after, it had raised 1.8 million signatures.
Once the petition was closed, it got major media attention and by the end of 2007, the then Prime Minister decided to listen “to its constituents and ditch the national road pricing scheme”.
Lessons learnt:
To host the service within its official website gave the new service a public seal of recognition, increasing the political weight of the petitions submitted through the site. And once the people spoke, media used that “legitimacy” of the site to push more on the Government.
New e-petition systems have to be integrated in the whole government-citizen dialogue structure, and e-petitions cannot “go on their own”.
Engaging with Citizens Online: Understanding the Role of ePetitioning in Local Government Democracy Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos, Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University
Potentially, e-petitioning (and petitioning in general) aims at engaging the citizen, should help in bringing more information to the citizen and in a quicker and more direct way, etc. But what is the reality like? And how does the system adapt to it?
A data collection of 13 semi-structured interview with key informants, and supported by informal contacts and documentary analysis was performed with the aim to examine the interactions between IT-related innovations and organizational changes.
The complexity and novelty of e-petition systems end up with the system being participated by many more stakeholders than usual: citizens and local organizations, the government, IT systems departments and providers, academic institutions, etc.
One of the problem that now raises is how to combine (offline) petitions with e-petitions, to decide the number of signatures that validate an e-petition (the same as offline? more? less?), etc. As a general conclusion, it seems that it is not the technological artefact the one that determines engagement and its impact, but the organizational/democratic backup it has.
Discussion
Q: How do people find the e-petition that interest them? Jungherr: Most of the times the e-petition is discussed in mainstream media, sometimes even being the story created in mainstream media, thus driving people to the site to endorse the e-petition. Panagiotopoulos: No doubt social networking sites help a lot in heating the debate and, over all, in distributing the link.
Q: Did people that initiated e-petitions had already exhausted other ways, or they directly “shopped around” the e-petitioning website? Linder: Data seem to prove that people that are active online are active offline too, and people that are active online they were already active offline.
[The discussion was rich and difficult to summarize here. Though, a personal recap of the session: online engagement is highly correlated with (prior) offline engagement; mainstream media (can) boost e-petitioning, crossmedia communication strategies might make a (huge) difference].
An Impact Assessment Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan
The Internet is a new device that can be used to drive change, but still we have to find out how. Most efforts to do so have ended in sheer failure.
A lot of the debate is understood as a confrontation between “us” the people that want to shape the Internet for higher goals, and “them” people that are lazy, ignorant or apathetic to politics. With the result of failure. Guidelines should be:
Biology, defining the possibilities.
Social scientific studies of learning, persuasion, etc.
Political contexts, that pose special challenges.
Persuasion is a battle for:
Attention. Attention has a very limited capacity and a high decay rate; thus, a winning utterance must provide a large amount of pleasure/pain and prevail over proximate other utterances. On the other hand, what a target audience remembers may not be what you intended them to remember.
Elaboration. Learning, physically (by linking neurons), is putting close two different concepts. To be able to leave a cognitive legacy, chunks of information have to be perceived ad unique and highly relevant. The topic has to be local, make its consequences concrete and immediate, and make the desired outcome possible to achieve through actions that the audience can imagine taking.
Credibility. Credibility is a lot about context. Politics is not only about what you say, but about how you say it: politics yields to language indeterminacy, with words having multiple meanings, and meanings being context-dependent. For contested issues, high credibility is a must, and credibility is domain-specific and bestowed by the audience. Credibility is a function of source, message and contextual attributes and audience effects. Credibility is about setting up strategic contexts, based on a perceived interest proximity, about interactivity.
How to build trust? The Habermas’ Argument: in the absence of natural law, no common framework informs legitimacy claims. If an ideal discourse is procedurally transparent, it can facilitate collective legitimacy.
Lupia-Krupnikov-Levine (2010): an expanded domain for transparency is required for discourse to generate legitimacy. A “procedurally transparent” discourse will anyway be influenced by interruptions, the order effects on persuasion, disagreement… matters difficult to deal with. Thus, this domain of procedural transparency has to be expanded, and there is also a need for a higher commitment in measuring success and failure.
Discussion
Q: How does the Sarah Palin and the Tea Party affaire can be explained with this frameworks? A: It is about localization: the message found its niche thanks to the Internet. Before that, the mainstream media space was crowded with messages and it was more difficult to allocate yours in there.
Q: Nowadays we do build at destroying credibility and reputation, how can new media contribute in solving that? A: New media can certainly act as counterweights to the biases of mainstream media. And microtargeting, making things local, relevant to me is a way of doing things that mainstream media can compete with.
e?Government in the Global South: machine politics as usual? Ramlal Satyan
Machine politics: electoral/democratic competition and exchange of (in)tangible services for electoral support; political inerference in the bureaucracy; intermnediaries between state and clients; gatekeeping and information hoarding.
The starting point of the research is that politics shapes e-government: there are political incentives and policy outcomes in technology use, and thus technology becomes not neutral.
The fact that poor people rely on intermediaries only aggravates this problem. The expectations are that poor people need to maintain good/cordial relationships with intermediaries, and that these leverage over bureaucracy and telecentres, telecentres are being captured by intermediaries, having these the ability to hoard information and maintain monopolies (gatekeeping).
Some open research problems: no difference might arise; clientelism encompasses more than just (a set of) services; choice of location and e-gov services; telecentres are a form of extra mediation; methods: within cases over time, or between cases?; training in network analysis.
Ward Berenschot Riot politics: communal violence and state society mediation in Gujarat, India.
ICT for accountability, transparency and participation Johan Hellström
In the last year, of all the national elections in Africa, only one was considered fair in its process: Ghana. In the meanwhile, many people have lost their right to information. Is there a field in ICT for Governance? can we narrow into ICT4 transparency? ICT4 Democracy?
The project is to use crowdsourcing tools to monitor 2011 national Ghana elections.
Do we have a theoretical framework?
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: I suggest some lines to explore: (1) Knowledge Gap Theory; (2) the debate on whether direct democracy might actually worsen democracy, because it will get people out of the system due to the high costs of being an active citizen; (3) talking to Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman; (4) consulting data from the Freedom on the Net index and the OpenNet Initiative (ONI).
Standardization and Regulatory Challenges in the implementation of e?Government in Ethiopia Jorro Yigezu Balcha
The development of ICT infrastructure, literacy rate, lack of commitment from leaders, human resources, development issues, political instabilities, legal and standardization issues, etc. are mentioned as the major challenges in the implementation of e-government services. Ethiopia is no exception in this aspect.
Among others, there are dire standardization challenges: local language issue, the process itself of standardization, lack of trained manpower in the area, enforcement of the standards, coordination of major stakeholders, etc.
Regulatory challenges: Manpower issues, lack of legislatures to support the service, enforcement.
The stakeholders that are involved in the process of standardization and preparation of legal framework don’t have equal sense about the importance and urgency of the standards and legal frameworks and their approval and enforcement.
The situation we are in is a context of crisis of political legitimacy. This means much less political participation in general and, more specifically, protest voting, young people voting less, decreasing levels of affiliation to parties or other civic organizations, etc.
On the other hand, we see the explosion of the Information Society and of the Web 2.0, “participative” by definition. ICTs are adopted by political organizations in the fields of eGovernment — to provide public services for the citizen — and eDemocracy — to enhance and foster participation.
Two different perspectives in the crossroads between political disaffection and the Information Society:
Cyberoptimism: ICTs will lead to a mobilization effect. More people will participate because participation costs are lower, there is much more information than before, etc.
Cyberpessimism: ICTs will lead to new elites because of the digital divide. The existing differences between the ones that participated and the ones that didn’t are broadened.
Realists: we need more empirical studies (and to avoid technological determinism).
We have new technologies for citizen participation but, what tools for what uses? A research for the Barcelona county council.
After a survey within the Barcelona municipalities, we can state:
There are different participation activities depending on whether the communication is horizontal or vertical.
There are topics more prone to intensively use ICTs: urban planning, youngsters, education and equality, elder people, sustainability.
Not organized citizens, resources, transversal coordination are variables that are usually identified as barriers not overcome; while training, innovation, agenda, associations or political agreement are usually identified as goals reached through ICT-enhanced participation.
The study then goes on to analyze tools and applications and how they fit in the participation process:
Directionality, quantitative: one-to-one, one-to-many, many to many.
Competences: basic, advanced, expert.
Applications: type of tool, cost, hosting, “mashability”.
Participation moments:
Mobilization: information about the participation process and the goals to be achieved.
Development: putting into practice the participation project.
Closing: stating the decision being made.
Follow up: monitoring and assessment of the decision reached.
A first analysis of 19 international cases, we see that most tools have a one-to-many directionality, are bidirectional, and are mainly used in the mobilization moment. User registration and the data they have to provide is an important issue and must be decided in advance, as happens with deciding the goals and functioning of the process, which includes defining and identifying the role of the online facilitator. Free software is usually the option chosen, and accessibility (in a broad sense) is normally taken into account.
We find two different models. Even if models are not “pure”, we can see opposite approaches: Initiatives aimed at community building, characterized by being open, relational, fostering engagement, using free tools and aiming at a networked participation, with a facilitator that engages in a bidirectional conversation. And policy oriented initiatives, characterized by being more formal (or formalized), focussing at decision-taking and representation, using own platforms and more “traditional” participation means, with a facilitator that guides and information that flows asymmetrically and unidirectionally.
Cloud computing is both an opportunity and a challenge. On the one hand, there are legal hazards that need being solved, but that also disclose some interesting spaces. Indeed, the new a-institutional logic is disruptive but also provides new ways of learning, as the public and private spheres intersect one to each other and get confused (want it or not) one with each other. It is a response to the de-legitimation of political institutions, but it is also a reassurance that citizens do care about public affairs: the crisis is in the institutions, not in participation itself.
Bernard Woolley: “Well, yes, Sir…I mean, it [open government] is the Minister’s policy after all.”
Sir Arnold: “My dear boy, it is a contradiction in terms: you can be open or you can have government.”
(from Yes Minister, 1980)
Evgeny Morozov, Georgetown University’s E. A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Decisions made at the technological level in Western economies/businesses will affect how cyberactivism takes place… all over the world. What Google, Twitter or Facebook decides impacts citizen action everywhere.
There is much effort on building social capital online, uploading content, gathering people in a group, and this effort relies on a potential arbitrary decision by the owner of the online platform, who serves who knows whose will. Groups in social networking sites disappear every day without previous notice and most times without an explicit and clear reason for it.
But regulating these corporations is often seen as a barrier to democratize more quickly less democratic countries. You don’t want to “spoil” a Web 2.0 application if it is seldom used to raise protests against non-democratic regimes, or used on human emergencies, etc.
But outside of Western countries, most applications are owned and run by local companies that have less freedom of choice than in other places of the World. If the Chinese or Russian or Iranian governments ask for user personal data to these companies, they have little chances not to deliver them. This makes datamining by governments very easy and very effective to locate and identify dissidents.
Besides direct extortion to companies, governments can directly monitor and put up several kinds of citizen surveillance, including entering an individual’s computer because the government infiltrated the computer with a trojan or any other kind of spy-software. Of all, the major problem is not even being aware of that manipulation. Same applies to web servers, of course.
On the legal side, governments or several lobbies have the power to manipulate content online, by crowding out conversations. If this is a trivial debate, then the influence of the strong part has no major impact. But if that is a pre-election debate, it can lead to indirect tampering and not-really-legitimate democratic participation.
And doing all that is not very difficult: custom police can (actually do) google people and see what comes up in the search results, scan their Facebook profiles, see who a specific person is related to and, according to that, decide to decline a visa request.
Besides governments, authors that we would not consider very “democratic” (e.g. fascist movements) are doing impressive things online in social networking sites, mashups, etc. So, Web 2.0 and cloud computing tools are double-edged swords and both serve noble and evil purposes and goals, like e.g. mapping where ethnics minorities are mashing up rich public data with map applications either to avoid or to attack them.
There is a dynamic that the Internet brings and that might makes us stop and think whether we like it or not: is a shift towards full openness a good thing? is a shift towards direct democracy a good thing too?
Discussion
Ana Sofía Cardenal: can you provide more information about the survey you talked about? Batlle: the survey was made in 112 cities (more than 10,000h less Barcelona). 81% answered the survey explaining use of ICT in participation initiatives.
Ana Sofía Cardenal: why nationalist movements are more present online than liberal ones? Morozov: the short answer is that hate travels more faster than hope online. But it might be more about phobia rather than nationalism. On the other hand, the Internet has no borders and allows for birds of the same flock to cluster around online spaces rather than having to stick to their artificial national myths.
Ismael Peña-López: data havens yes or no? protection or impunity? Morozov: One the one hand, governments should not support law circumvention tools (like TOR), basically because they are massively used by criminals, or by people whose purpose is not very clear and its justification varies depends on your approach. Regarding Wikileaks, the problem is that once a hot file is out, it is difficult to block, and the more you try to block it, the more it is disseminated (the Streisand effect). Something should be done, yes, but it is not clear what.
Ronald Leenes: It is also true that governments also use tools that activists use for security reasons, so they should at least allow for these tools to develop and even be funded. Morozov: right, but you cannot be pushing for the rule of law and with the other hand allowing the proliferation of tools that are clearly used to break the rule of law. Leenes: this apply to many technologies!
Jordi Vilanova: We’re talking about social networking sites as being run by corporations, but it is likely that in the future we find SNS being ruled by foundations or non-governmental organizations. So, there still is some room for Web 2.0 applications being “safely” used by individuals. A second comment is that we are looking at non-democratic regimes but, in the meanwhile, so-called liberal democracies are trimming citizen rights with the excuse of security and so. So we should be more concerned about these hypocrite countries. Morozov: it is true that foundations can run their own SNS, but the thing is that most times is not about the tool, but about audience and critical mass, and this audience is in private corporations’ platforms, and this will be difficult to change. And regarding transparency, transparency has to come with footnotes to avoid misleads.
Irekia is the open government project of the Basque Government to provide public data in a very accessible way, easy to reuse. Open Cloud Government is more a philosophy than a technology, it is another way to manage public affairs, to decide taking into account the citizens’ opinion. Irekia is not a services website, it is not an e-Administration website. Irekia is a website to listen to the citizen, to offer immediate information in search for debate and reflection.
Data are linked from the original source.
Transparency, participation, collaboration.
What does Irekia offer the citizen:
Tools for collaborative work.
Streaming of events.
Informations in real time.
Daily agenda
Audiovisual and multimedia material.
Tools to comment and share information.
This kind of initiatives are based on leadership and government commitment. Otherwise, they are neither possible nor sustainable. Besides political support and commitment, open government also requires a radical organizational change and, over all, a change in attitudes. It is in the daily tasks that open government succeeds or fails.
What does Irekia offer the members of the public administration:
On demand audiovisual material.
Internal agenda per department.
Possibility to diffuse events.
Active Internet monitoring (escucha activa, what is being said about you on the Net).
Consultancy 2.0.
Comment moderation.
Complete, tag and disseminate on the Web information published by the departments.
One of the goals of open government is not to have a lot of traffic, or a lot of sympathisers of the website, but to be a hub and distribute interests to their goals. e.g. what open government pretends is not creating online communities of patients, but that they are able to do it by themselves.
One of the problems, notwithstanding, of “all being open” is that anyone can create their own participation platform (government and citizens) and it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who’s “legitimate” to promote a certain activity; it is also becoming increasingly difficult to find out where to participate, or what for; there’s a big replication of projects that reinvent the wheel on and on, etc.
Open Administration Consortium: built upon the principles of collaboration, ICTs and change. Why collaboration?
Interoperability: not about technology, but about the citizen and the interaction between public administrations.
Reutilization: Avoid reinventing the wheel.
Security. Digital identity, electronic signature, long-lasting validation.
Cloud computing is not a new technology, but a new way to provide services. But, in the public service, this means some struggles:
82% of cities and towns are below 5,000 inhabitants which means they have no resources for an IT director. Same happens with organizational management.
Actually, in general city councils have increasing obligations and decreasing revenues/resources.
The management of (electronic) services is complex: more services, specific regulation, security, 24×7 availability, scalability, etc.
Reluctance to change.
The Open Administration Consortium works with district and province councils — as they are the more knowledgeable on the reality of city councils — and Localret, a consortium of municipalities to develop ICT strategies. The Open Administration Consortium provides, thus, different services to the different municipalities according to their needs, nature and resources. Among others, main services include public procurement, online invoicing, inter-administrative procedures, citizen documents, etc.
Reluctances are the usual about privacy, data security, liability of data management, fear of change, fear of cyberwar, etc.
I look forward a municipality that will have no physical space, no web servers, no… but a virtual desktop where all data, applications and services will be hosted. This will be especially useful for the secretary of several tiny towns (small towns usually share a single public officer) that will be able to manage three or four of them from just a virtual desktop and teleworking from home.
