The Promise and Contradictions of E-Democracy, Obama Style Micah L. Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum
Expectations that the Obama administration would continue the tone of the Obama campaign: lowering barriers to participation, opening the government, etc. But it does not seem that expectations have been accomplished.
The Campaign
The open government directive was the first one to be issued when entering the White House. It claimed for a more open, more participative, more collaborative.
Obama campaign, from the primary elections, was a different campaign (and a different candidate too).
And the voters were different too: almost everyone in the US is online and is not only online to get information but able to participate. For instance, amongst the total videos mentioning Obama or McCain (circa 150,000) only 10% of the were made by the candidates.
Obama metrics: 13m e-mail addresses, 3.9 individual donors (double the highest score since), 2m profiles on MyObama, 200K offline events created, etc.
The Government
There was no small-donor revolution, at least not in the early money (money raised in the previous year to the election), which is very important in the US: the candidate that raises more money that year, wins the election: money votes, the money primary. $1000+ donors dominated and almost doubled donors below $200. Indeed, the only candidate that fliped the profile and got more than 50% in small donations was Howard Dean.
Obama believed in the structure that the volunteers had created, and to make it last beyond the election, to help him in not surrendering to the powers of the lobbies and the machinery of Washington, D.C. But often the idea was to circumvent mass media and beam a packed message directly to the voters, without letting this “structure” to participate in that beaming.
And this is still happening: Obama runs out of the filter of mass media whenever he can, being present in less open interviews and more available to closed ones or youtube-aimed videos.
The Open Government Dialogue worked quite well, but got an infinitesimal share of attention that the campaign did — maybe because the average citizen is more interested in their daily problems.
Data.gov has also been a good initiative to be transparent (schizophrenic, though, with other initiatives to avoid accountability).
Opinion Space to register your opinion about some international issues. While the initiative looks interesting, the real purpose behind it has never been disclosed by the government.
But, the general public is not responding to these initiatives, people do not feel engaged, people do not find that the government is more transparent, accountable, listening to people, etc.
Empowerment?
The Internet does not empower anyone, we empower ourselves. One-to-many communication and many-to-one is easy, many-to-many is hard.
If we’re going to empower ourselves, we need better tools.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: Let us assume these open government initiatives are genuine. If people do not feel engaged — for whatever reason, but maybe because they still tend to mass media to get their political information —, are not mass media missing the point of “translating” what’s on the “open” websites to the general public? Or maybe these initiatives are not that genuine? A: Mass media might be not knowing what is their role. They are fascinated by this new media, but they do not how to handle it. On the other hand, people do not understand that a government can become a media itself, and not be mediated by others. We are in a transition: the mass media think their role as gatekeepers is over, people have to learn what their (new) sources are, there is no balance in focusing on the real participation (vs. the extremes demonstrations of opinion). Existing mass media give as a distorted view of what citizen engagement is, and this blocks more fruitful encounters.
Matthew Allen: why online tools are so week? is it because ties are also week? A: All Blue platform allows anyone to raise money for a candidate, cause, etc. or the case of Move On are ways to crate more committed ways to participate, and to strengthen the bounds between the candidate and the voter, and set the former freer from the big money. Impact + real time feedback can create a positive loop of engagement.
Q: why such low engagement in open government platforms? How to manage the tension between top-down and bottom-up approaches? A: people interested in these issues are not many. About the tension between approaches, the truth is that there was no plan for day 1 after the election concerning participation, engagement, etc. even if the campaign supporters kept on calling and writing to the campaign office with “now what?” and “how now?” questions.
What is understood about participation is not the same thing across Europe.
Momentum aims at monitoring the existing eParticipation projects in order to collect and consolidate their results and disseminate them to all relevant institutions in the EU and to all interested civil society acgtors.
Began in January 2008 and is to last 30 months.
The Role of eParticipation in the European Climate Change Debate Oli Lacigová
WAVE project to engage citizens in the debate about climate change.
Usability has been an issue, even if the website is really visual and, at first glance, easy to track the related topics.
Results of the debates are aggregated and presented to members of the parliament(s).
e-Government strategy in Austria
Different working groups to cover all the different aspects of an e-Government strategy: presentation layer, integration and access, law and security, infrastructures and interoperability.
HUWY is meant to support youth participation in politics-related debates, to encourage young people to talk about policies and laws which affect the Internet. On the other hand, there is another aim to channel these reflections, ideas, recommendations to people in governments and parliaments.
There are four national websites (UK, Germany, Estonia, Ireland) and a European hub were you can access the results from all conversations.
Some topics that arouse: cyberbulling, child abuse and safety, ID theft, privacy, phishing, file sharing, security, copyright, censorship, freedom of speech, etc.
New approaches in the project: emphasis on process, deliberation in own spaces, use existing groups and networks, blending off- and online spaces, policy-makers involved as partners, use of stories to engage.
(note: these were all demos of the several projects, hence much more happened than these notes might reflect)
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EDEm10 - 4th International Conference on eDemocracy (2010)
Social Networking on Climate Change: The IDEAL-EU Experience Francesco Molinari and Erika Porquier
Deployment of a multilingual Social Networking Platform in three European Regions (Catalonia, Poitou-Charentes and Tuscany) dealing with the issue of climate change and energy policy-making at the level of the European Parliament (http://www.ideal-debate.eu).
Research questions:
Are computer-based SNS valid extensions for F2F interaction?
Can they be of use for policitians and policy-makers?
Are there any structural differences between a EU and US approach?
Social Networking Sites are growing in audience and in amount of time spent in them. But it is problable (according to data) that though being used really intensivelly, SNS are still used by a minority: they pattern of adoption differs from most other online applications.
And it seems that Dunbar’s number (n=150) also applies to SNS.
Chris Kelly (2007) stated that there are five impact areas of social networking sites in US politics: branding, voter registration, fundraising, volunteering and voter turnout.
The project
The project featured a social networking site to debate climate change. Topics were launched and moderated by community facilitators.
Five characters of successful social networking sites in EU/US politics:
Specialist rather than generalist
Top down (by government initiative, rather than bottom up (party campaign)
Dealing with policy issues, rather tahn electoral aims
Presence of lively debates increases reputation and attractiveness, thus Google driven traffic (only EU)
They can induce mass imitation and multiplicative effects (only EU)
“Vote Rush” (US) vs. “Bar Chat” (EU).
Recommendations:
Limited in scope, single issue
Aiming at structural change in behaviour of people
E-Government and Social Media: The Queensland Government’s MYQ2 Initiative Matthew Allen and Mark Balnaves, Curtin University of Technology
Toward Q2: information-oriented website with markers of “interaction” but little action.
MyQ2: informatics in action, commitments, communications, citizens adopting behaviours aligned with governmental goals.
MyQ2 lets you create a “commitment” on the website (i.e. a task you’ll perform, a goal you pretend to achieve, etc.) and you can make it public, state why it is important, comment it, be reminded about it, etc.
Shift from understanding e-government as “talking” to understanding e-government as “acting”.
g4c2c: Enabling Citizen Engagement at Arms’ Length from Government Axel Bruns and Adam Swift
Why some top-down (G2G) approaches have failed?
Government operated projects have limited impact on government decision-making, often result in general criticism, have problems with effective management by public service.
May be mere service delivery
Simply perceived as insubstantial spin
Citizen participation is a fig leaf for goverment
Process of impacting on gov desicions unclear
Why some bottom-up (C2C) approaches have failed?
Some of them are not representative, have good functionality but have limited take-up by target community.
May generate open an engaged debate
Often only by usual suspects
Perceptino of inherent bias, unrepresentative community
Unable to match the clout of eswtablishede lobby groups
Too distant from politicdal actors to be recognised
Towards G4C2C
Desirable qualities for citizen consultation:
Government support and recognition
Independent and flexible operation and management
Distant enough to allow real community development
Close enough for outcomes to be accepted as meaningful
Government support for citizen-to-citizen initiatives: the government is involved, but not directly promoting, but supporting:
Hybrid model combining g2c and c2c aspects
Government-supported, but at arms’ length from government
Public service broadcasting approach
Participation by citizens as well as politicians and officials
cf. “Civic Commons 2.0” (Coleman & Blumler, 2009): a space of intersecting networks, pulled together through the agency of a democratically connecting institution, raises questions about the scale of such a project.
The Expressive Turn of Political Participation and Citizenship in the Digital Age Jakob Svensson, Karlstad University
Is a democracy sustainable without participation? What do we mean by the “political”?
Concerns of the organization and structure of society
The relationships of power, distribution and equity
Discursive and relational
Characteristics of the late modernity:
dispersion of cultural frameworks
Individualization
The network and the digital
Sub-politics and life-politics
Instrumental rationality: why participate if I’m getting anything in exchange? why engage citizens if costs are higher than benefits? And if participation is good/better for anyone, then why people do not participate?
Expressive rationality
“Expressive preferences” (Brennan) are not the same thing as “market preferences”: self-realization, processes of identification, networked individualism, etc.
Participation as an act of identity expression, participation provides participants with meaning.
Do Facebook and Video Games promote political Participation among Youth? Evidence from Singapore Marko M. Skoric and Grace Kwan, Nanyang Technological University
Is there any relationship between using these emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment, and political participation among young Singaporeans. See if these platforms are “third places” (Oldenburg) where they hang out and eventually participate.
Literature (like Pew Internet Projecte, 2008) shows that there is huge civic potential in Facebook, MMORPGs, etc.
While traditional media are quite controlled in Singapore, the Internet is not, so freedom of speech is almost guaranteed. There are also weak civic traditions.
There are some examples where social media have been used to impact the traditional media, by starting protests online, taking them offline (organizing online an offline protest) and then hitting and appearing in mainstream media, once (or during) the offline event has taken place.
Do intensive usage of Facebook and intensive gaming has an impact in (a) traditional participation or (b) online participation? Is there a relationship between online and offline participation?
Findings
Being a Facebook is slightly correlated with participation in politics
Intensity of usage is correlated with in both online and traditional participation
Gaming alone is not related with participation
But civic game-playing is correlated with participation
And online and offline participation are also correlated
Facebook use and video gaming linked with both online and offline participation
Online participation as a driver of traditional participation
(increased) Importance of attention to political/public affairs news in traditional media, even for online participation
Disruption and Empowerment: Embedding Citizens at the Heart of Democracy Andy Williamson, Director of Digital Democracy, Hansard Society
Where have we failed?
What are the challenges?
It’s not about technology, but about people…
We have historically been shifting from community societies to individualist societies, from citizens to consumers. We are treated as consumers of “democratic services”, a consumer of democracy. And we are not: we are citizens.
People have gotten used not to do anything, not to get up and demonstrate their thoughts: 4% of British citizens are involved in some participation activity; 5% want active involvement; 24% want more of a say; % just want information; 16% don’t care. The ones that want active involvement are the primary goal, while the 24% that “want more of a say” do not want to talk about “politics” or “e-government” but about schools or public transportation: we have to address them in their own language/interests.
In the last 10 years we have been unable to create a momentum of participation. We got some true successes, but we failed in creating a social change. The reason is that we did not bridge the adoption gap of most (e-)participation initiatives.
Privileging individuals over the collective reduces opportunities for citizens to be engaged, debate and modify their believes. When we look at individuals as individuals we lose social capital, the relationships.
How can we reassert and independent public sphere when it remains colonised by powerful corporate interests, media outlets and technocratic agencies?. You really need higher levels of information literacy and lots of time to find out the truth amongst all the diverging discourses. And we are colonized by technocratic agendas.
Citizens do not trust governments, but governments/politicians trust even less citizens. Consulting the citizens is costly and expensive, and it takes a lot of time and you (governments) do not know where you’ll end up. A participative democracy is a healthy democracy.
Some NGOs have bought into the technocratic arguments of government. We have created an intermediate layer of civil society representatives that actually do not represent the civil society and were never elected to. If NGOs were there to fill the void of participation and engagement, the Internet changes the whole landscape.
Several access stages to be able to participate:
Mental access
Material access
Skills access
Usage access
Civil access
Democratic access
But the Internet itself won’t motivate me, but a wish. The Internet is not a motivation tool, but it certainly is a barrier/enabler.
And there is a huge gap between governments and online engagement, and technology. We need a brand new bunch of people to facilitate online engagement. We need a disruption in the system. We need to find people of both sides (i.e. governments and citizenry) to build it together. Governments need to understant citizen participation, and citizens have to understand the democracy cycle.
Two examples: NHS Website vs. Patient opinion, the first one does not work, the second one does.
Discussion
Q: we are operating in a representative system and most e-democracy claims for a deliberative or even a direct democracy. How do we make this shift? A: There is a vested interest in keeping the actual system. It would be a more realistic approach to just aim for people to participate a little bit more. It’s not a revolution: it’s an evolution.
Q: People asking for more democracy and more participation are failing at educating people on what democracy is, represents and how does it work. A: We should certainly talk more about democracy than about the “e-“.
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