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:
explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes were taking place,
focus on why these socioeconomic changes were taking place and
infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for
another wave of changes to happen.
In other words:
we have shifted from an Industrial Society to an Information Society (and what each concept means),
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
that we should really be aware of digital competences, the digital divide and the unbalances of power
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.
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.
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.
Notes from the research seminar Citrizen security in electronic environments. The case of electornic voting, by Jordi Puiggalí, held at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, on January 28th, 2010.
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: always available.
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
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.
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;
Together with other people, I am working in a project that includes a sort of catalogue of online participation tools. In three senses:
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:
Comments on the taxonomy
Examples of kinds of online participation tools (e.g. maps)
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
Updated with Roser Beneito‘s comments on the “Directionality: quantitative” section. Thanks!
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).
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.
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