Carolina Velasco: one of the problems with cyberactivism is creating buzz around some concepts or information or pieces of news that are not fully understood by who’s endorsing them. A: Agreed. Indeed, the fact is that there’s people that are highly technologically literate and master several tools, but lack other dimensions of digital literacy such as informational literacy or e-awareness, for instance, and have the ability to endorse but without a critical point of view.
For the next month (July 13th to August 7th, 2009) I am teaching — actually guiding — a course on the Digital Divide and e-Participation at UNDP‘s Escuela Virtual para América Latina y el Caribe [Virtual School for Latin America and the Caribbean].
The course is framed in one of the last stages before the actual creation of the Virtual School and it mainly deals with the definition of the overall strategy, identifying the context and the characteristics of the environment and see how the network of telecenters the school will heavily rely on have to be adapted to provide the expected output: digital competences and a much higher degree of e-Participation amongst the population.
The (my) course has four parts, two of which are related to knowing the grounds and concepts of the Digital Divide and e-Participation, and the remaining two deal with writing an Action Plan and reviewing the Strategic Plan in the framework of the Colombian Plan for the Information Society.
Ministerio de Comunicaciones (2009). Plan TIC Colombia. En Línea con el Futuro. Presentation by María del Rosario Guerra, Ministra de Comunicaciones, Bogotá D.C., mayo 28 de 2009. Bogotá: Ministerio de Comunicaciones de la República de Colombia.
Peña-López, I. & Guillén Solà, M. (2008). Telecentro 2.0 y Dinamización Comunitaria. Conference imparted in El Prat de Llobregat, November 5th, 2008 at the V Encuentro de e-Inclusión, Fundación Esplai. El Prat de Llobregat: ICTlogy.
Two major questions today: what will we do? how will we stay safe?
Innovation come not by using specific technology or platforms but on the effective uses we put into them.
The safety issue seems not to be approachable by the Law alone, being self-regulation and self-commitment a good share of it, and collaboration and co-operation another good share of it.
In a time of crisis, the international community turns its attention to the Information Society. But this is not about hardware, but about organizational change, institutional change. A major planning has to take place to deal with focal issues like e-commerce, network safety or e-Administration.
We’d do well to learn from sub-national or even local successes in open data initiatives, or data sharing initiatives. And what a different it makes to move from the “e-” Government to the “o-” Government.
And open data might be a necessary step to change not only government but also democracy and politics, to enable citizen participation and engagement.
We’re seeing times where political crisis and financial crisis is accompanied by a demand for transparency, openness, open data, etc. And it looks like broadly demanded political reforms could move towards this direction.
This is, for instance, how Politics 2.0 evolve from Politicians 2.0 towards Political Spaces 2.0.
Politics 2.0 can be presented as a virtuous circle, where everybody is part of that circle, and where the sense of “small” (as in a small issue) can have a brand new meaning (and not be small or irrelevant at all).
Will, hence, the unconventional ways of doing politics become the conventional or mainstream ones? Do we want that?
What is the right agenda? Does a creative use of public information (initially well intended) have bad consequences?
Next steps?
W3C Access to Government interest group
Pulic Services 2.0 declaration
From “come back tomorrow” to “come back next year”?
Political participation and Social Networking Sites Chaired by Ana Sofía Cardenal
Marta Cantijoch, Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, PolNet research group.
The distinction amongst citizens is not only between people that participate and that do not participate, but also in how they participate when they do, distinguishing between conventional or unconventional political participation (Political Action Study, 1979), or representational and extra-representational participation (Teorell, Torcal and Montero, 2007): e.g. go to demonstrations, follow calls to boycott products or actions, etc. The latter group is acting outside institutions, thus his political action is not only about a specific position but forms also matter and are plenty of meaning.
In general, we’re seeing a change of attitude where conventional engagement is decreasing (i.e. less people being partisans in a political party) while unconventional politics are increasing. One of the reasons being dissatisfaction towards performance of representative democracy.
Combination of attitudes:
Disaffected citizens: dissatisfaction + low involvement = apathy, non, participation
Social networking sites provide both a qualitative and a quantitative change: higher amount of available information combined with a higher diversity of discourses; contacts and exchanges in horizontals processes (citizen to citizen) made possible while the control of communication stays in the users’ hands; interactivity.
Social networking sites also represent an open gate towards unsolicited, though relevant, information that affects your peers, or your weak ties, but that (positively) reshapes one’s own context.
Consequences:
Tools for citizen empowerment: processes of communication are citizen-initiated (vs. elite directed)
Reinforcement / promotion of attitudinal change: non-hierarchical communication processes
Impact on critical citizens but also on institutionalized profiles
Internet use fosters unconventional forms of participation, a hypothesis verified for the Spanish case.
New opportunity for formal institutions to reconnect to the public, to try and bring them back to the representative democracy arena. This will of course require an adaptation to web 2.0 technologies in the exchanges with the citizens: abandoning the top-down logic, certain degree of decentralization, and higher granularity of participation.
Nobody knows more than everyone together José Antonio Donaire, Member of the Catalan Parliament, Catalan Socialist Party.
Politics 2.0 is not ICT-enhanced politics, or e-Politics. It’s a change of paradigm enabled by a technological change.
Change of paradigm:
The crisis of the autoritas, in the case of representative democracy, the crisis of parties, where a minority sets the general agenda in contradiction with a supposed representative democracy. The change should be towards deliberative democracy, the collective intelligence, collaborative work. The more people debate on a subject, the lower the margin of error. But not only to decrease errors: the deliberative process is a goal in itself. Deliberative democracy negates the autoritas and brings the wisdom back to the collective.
Adaptation from politics to policies, from the big politics to the policies of shades and the small details.
The appearance of complexity, where the same person can have different opinions that not necessarily match the traditional division of left-wing, right-wing or a specific ideology. Multiple identities have to be acknowledged and hence spaces for contact need to be enabled.
How to put this into practice? Different models that can be understood as progressive stages:
Politicians 2.0: the members of the Parliament, etc. have twitter or Facebook accounts, write on their blogs, etc. This provides transparency, interaction, a first person communication (despite the vertical discourse of the party), proximity. Politicians 2.0 are, nevertheless, a necessary but not sufficient step towards Politics 2.0
Political means 2.0, that enable participation, the collective intelligence, managing the complex, rewarding or recognising meritocracy. A wiki, for instance, can allow most of these aspects. The network also generates autoritas, but it is a well deserved autoritas. The Catalan Parlament 2.0 could be an example of this.
Politicized means 2.0, that enable the exchange of ideas, community building and creation of communities, cyberactivism, against particracy. The pros is that people debate seriously, the cons is that they might lead to quasi-parties.
Political spaces 2.0: gathering spaces, dialogue and exchange, complex identities, against particracy.
A distinction between direct democracy and deliberative democracy. The Net to directly decide can lead to dangerous outcomes or problems as the NIMBY, lobbying or even taking the whole system as a joke (e.g. the Spanish “efecto Chikilicuatre”, where Spaniards chose a stand-up comedy actor to represent Spain at Eurovision).
But politics will be 2.0 or won’t be.
Ricard Espelt, Copons Town Councillor, in charge of Economic Promotion, New Technologies and Communication.
In a small town like Copons, problems are small but real ones, and the traditional solution would be that the citizen would shift the problem towards the city council, which might or might not solve the problem, given their limited resources.
Copons 2.0 aims at bringing the citizen back in the equation.
Problems should be able to be rephrased as alternatives, opportunities, requirements… In any case, a problem should be an excuse for a debate, for an encounter within the town and within citizens themselves.
The Administration is seen as a resource, but its limits are properly framed and known by everyone.
And the citizen is, again, no more a “whiner” but someone who can also contribute with solutions, or contributing to “the” solution.
Social networking sites put all these things together, making possible sharing, deliberation, participation, etc.
Far from corporativism, Copons opted for universal and socialized tools, in the cloud, for free: WordPress, Facebook, Flickr, etc. and everything licensed with Creative Commons. Notwithstanding, opinions were only accepted if backed with a real digital profile, even if they were popular or widely accepted.
Surprisingly, online administrative processes have been the less popular, being participative tools the most used. The major: There’s no opposition: it is the citizens who are watching us. Working on the net and in such a framework, the administration has to be transparent and the citizens ask for highest degrees of accountability, responsibility, etc.
What happens with the digital divide? Wifi areas and digital literacy workshops were created to help the laggards catch up with the rest. Training is made on a peer-to-peer basis, where initiated volunteers help their neighbours. Now, more people have digital profiles, there’s more broadband penetration, offline debate has been enriched and enhanced by online debate, people self-organize. A good pro: everybody knows who their representatives are and viceversa.
The Copons 2.0 project has been able to deal with quite complex problems, problems that came from a long tail of approaches, that gathered all the relevant agents (known and unknown) affected by the problem, etc. And sometimes, the identified solutions belonged not to the Government sphere, but to a shared set of responsibilities/responsibles. But, as monitoring is constant, solutions are temporal and they quickly enter a process of constant improvement… as in a permanent beta.
Q&A
Franck Dumortier: Where are the limits of conventional and unconventional? How is your digital identity affected by you participation conventionally or unconventionally? (e.g. a demonstration that ends up with you on jail because of some uncontrolled riots)
Ismael Peña-López: the impact of SNS on critical and institutionalized citizens, is it the same one? Is it more “2.0” in the case of critical/grassroots and more “1.0” in the case of institutionalized/top-down? José Antonio Donaire: we’ll most probably be seeing Politics 2.0 made up of the 4 stages mentioned below. On the other hand, it not about web 2.0 tools, or web 2.0 tools used the 1.0 or the 2.0 way, but whether there is a deliberative process, however it takes place. Marta Cantijoch: Agreed, it’s not about technology but processes and philosophy, a participatory one, despite whether it is made with web 1.0 or 2.0 applications.
Ismael Peña-López: does Politics 2.0 require a lot more effort/work or can it be mainstreamed in every day’s politics? Ricard Espelt: more than a matter of workload, is a matter of attitude, whether one wants to engage with the citizenry or wants to be pro-active in politics, or just sit on the City Council.
Q: How does participatory politics fit with a party system, closed, not really representative, power centred, top-down managed, etc.? Why should I speak with a politician, interact with them, if they are wired to/by the party? José Antonio Donaire: I’m absolutely for open lists in elections. But, but this radically change the scenario? It might make the individual politician more responsible, but the change of paradigm goes way beyond that. A representative system is efficient, but it does not necessarily require that it is the party/government who decides both the agenda and the results of the agenda setting. There is an urgent need to recover the debate, the collective finding of the truth, the enlightenment.
Albert Batlle: What happens with the profile of satisfied citizen but not active/engaged? Marta Cantijoch: this profile perfectly fits within the Institutionalized group.
Albert Batlle: How do we scale up the Copons 2.0 model? For instance, from the local to the national or the international level. How do we reach consensus there? Ricard Espelt: We have a low sense of the common good and of the community. The problem of scalability is most probably not a matter of size, but of consensus. Big participatory projects do not work not because they are big, but because they are top-down. José Antonio Donaire: Maybe what works is common interest. If Copons 2.0 works it might be because the small town is thematically coherent. We thus can build bigger communities that, notwithstanding, have a common thematic core. And the politician should have channels so that they can practice an active hearing, a way to gather knowledge in which to base their decisions.
Q: (to José Antonio Donaire) Why should a politician want to end up politics? What does it mean ending up conventional politics? How would you then become a Member of Parliament? A: I am aware that representative politics works, but it is a fragile one, and there’s evidence of disaffection and of loss of sense of community. When talking about politics outside politics, this means not without politics, but outside of (or without) conventional politics. The idea is not throwing politicians away, but working with the citizens to set up the agenda, to decide what’s to be decided, etc.
Mònica Vilasau: How do we connect engagement and a call for participation with results? How not to deceive people? Is it easier in smaller places? Are outcomes easier to achieve at smaller scales? José Antonio Donaire: It’s better a citizen association building up a website and imagining what they’d like, than the City Council asking for ideas. A good example could be Las 1001 Ideas.
Ana Sofía Cardenal: For a deliberative democracy, we need a genuine motivation. But there are demagogues that want to manipulate the public arena. What to do with them? José Antonio Donaire: On the Net, reputation is very transparent. In a network of people it is more difficult to be cynical.
The Plan Avanza [the Spanish plan to foster the Information Society] had an important part in raising awareness on the risks of the Internet, but also on providing confidence to newcomers.
The Spanish Law for the Access to Electronic Public Services also included strong measures to provide these services with high levels of confidence, e.g. so that people felt equally secure e-invoicing as invoicing.
The Spanish government has issued several other initiatives to promote confidence and security on the Internet as accompanying measures to major stratetegies like the promotion of Internet in the classroom, G2B and B2B projects, etc.
One of the drawbacks that we usually find in security measures is that humans are the weakest link: technology can be prepared to face difficult challenges or strong security attacks, but humans — because of ignorance, lack of digital literacy or just because they forget to — quite often perform actions in most insecure ways.
Robustness of infrastructures, collaboration platforms or emergent IT models are strategic issues to develop safer Internet strategies at the telecoms level.
Catalonia National Information Security Plan Nacho Alamillo, Director General Astrea La Infopista Jurídica S.L.
Surprisingly, there are few attacks in comparison to how poorly prepared are the Administrations, firms and citizens in matters of Internet security. And one of the problems of cybercrime is not only cybercrime itself, but that it is normally tied to other illegal actions such as laundry money, (forced) prostitution, etc.
Reasons why people and institutions are poorly protected: lack of awareness, bad code/software, speed of technological changes (e.g. anti-virus being obsolete in 10′), lack of resources (e.g. small towns with -500 inhabitants but holding their data).
Main drivers of safer Internet policies: Privacity, e-Administration and secure infrastructures.
Strategic goals of the Catalonia National Information Security Plan:
Establishment of a nation-wide safety strategy: research, awareness, collaboration within Administrations, fostering existing initiatives, etc.
Backing the protection of critical infrastructures, especially those obsolete (“old is easier to attack”): electronic communications, electronic systems for industry control (SCADA), priority lines, etc.
Fostering of a business network that provides secure IT: industrial policy to promote secure IT, creation of a private sector that provides social benefits, community based on free software.
Increasing confidence in the Information Society: fight against cybercrime, help lines to risk-prone collectives
Q&A
Ramon Codina: IPv6, which is known to be more secure, is going to be implemented in the short run at the Spanish level? Óscar Martínez: There are already “islands” that have implemented this protocol, but interoperability with other protocols is still a barrier. On the other hand, and as usual, the chain is as strong as its weaker link, which means that the implementation of the IPv6 should be made at the international level or, at least, at a European level. And this is still a far horizon.
Ismael Peña-López: After a first wave to put up content and handbooks and guidelines about security on a push-strategies basis, are we seeing a shift towards pull-strategies? Nacho Alamillo: We are trying to embed security procedures in each and every daily procedure in education, retail selling, etc. so that it becomes invisible and “normal” in everyone’s life. Óscar Martínez: We are trying too to create self-learning content instead of top-down training plans, so to give answers to people when they have the questions, and not the other way round. On the other hand, we’d rather focus on toolkits (again, answering specific questions) rather than generic handbooks, more how-to’s or what for’s instead of theoretical approaches.
Marc Tarrés: What’s the state of standards? Are they converging towards consensus? Nacho Alamillo: So far, there’s many of them and this poses a real coordination problem, though many efforts are being put in this subject.
Access to public information and Social Networking Sites Chaired by Ismael Peña-López
e-Government at W3C José Manuel Alonso, CTIC Foundation / World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
There is an increasing trend demanding open public information, raw public information, instead of one stop shops to access public services or public information that has already been “treated” or “prepared” for the citizen. Why should administrations limit the interactions with their citizens?
Governments should shift from being owners of data to being curators of data.
Benefits of freeing data are many, arguably being the most relevant one the “Many minds principle”: there’ll always be someone that will find out a way to reuse data that you wouldn’t have even figured.
Three steps to reuse: identify relevant data, represent them so that they can be used, and expose them to the wider world.
Data.gov, the flagship of the US Government on open data.
If data are put in appropriate formats, they can be syndicated, aggregated, etc. And the costs of doing this, remixing, reshaping, etc. are almost zero to governments: once data are published, it’s private interests (for or not for profit) with do the rest.
Linked Data: its principle is to empower data so that they can be interlinked and enriched. The idea is to link a data set with another one, and that one yet with another one, etc. This should be able to be done automatically, so when applications accessed a data set, it “browsed” several data sets to build a new combined data set… and all of this made transparently for the user.
Challenges are many: alignment with the mission and strategy, there are some costs, inner capabilities of the administration, security, integrity, persistence of data (that data can always be found in the same place), licensing models and their compatibilities, legacy systems, standardization, etc.
In 1833 journalist Mariano José de Larra wrote Vuelva usted mañana (Please come back tomorrow) about the Administration’s inefficiency. Almost 200 years later, we’ve been adding technology to processes but the Administration remains the same. Our goal should be to make this statement obsolete by boosting efficiency and citizen satisfaction.
e-Government is somehow the same path of the modernization of the Administration but with an opposite approach, focussing on people and knowledge instead of processes and technology.
Usually, Administrations focus their e-Government strategies on the online availability of their public services, beginning with income-generating services. On the other hand, the stress has also been put more on G2B services rather than on the citizen.
And, do we know how much e-Government services are used?
What we do know is that a lot of money has been spent in government portals but the efficacy and the efficiency is yet to be made evident.
Shift from e-Government to Open Government (o-Government): services centred in the citizen and co-designed with the citizen; transparency and accountability; innovation fostering. And open data is a pre-requisite of o-Government, being a real exercise of transparency settling democracy. Open data reduce information asymmetry, firms get access to wealthy information and a new kind of citizen emerges: the infomediary.
If data is open, there is no need to agree (neither with the government, nor amongst citizens) on what services need to be set up: emergent initiatives will be able to set them up at their own will, as the resources are plainly available. For instance, Apps for Democracy.
Reusing public information for change Jordi Graells, Deputy Director of Content and Innovation in the Catalan government’s (Presidential Department) Citizen Service Office.
Innovation should be aimed at creating value, to transform knowledge to create value.
Gary Hamel: (new) leadership is about enabling rather than doing, is about distributing power, about managing the collective intelligence. On a managing approach, professionals should be put first, then the customer and then the stakeholders… which can easily be translated into the field of the Administration.
But the abundance of barriers and constraints lead us to empowerment through open data. And one of the main enablers of open data is open licences, so that these data cannot only be accessed but also (re)used by anyone.
In 2007 the Catalan Government begins using Creative Commons licenses in their publications. In 2009 the Catalan Government agrees that all publications (whenever there are intellectual propertyh rights) will be using CC licenses — being the optimum in the long run putting all public content in the public domain.
Roadmap of the Catalan Government:
Law 37/2007 for the reuse of public information, adding disclaimers to public information clarifying how it can be reused
Put information into open data bases so that data can be reused, with several options depending of he kind of database (just data, access to collections of third parties’ materials, etc.)
CC licensing for content with IP rights
But it’s not only about administrative change, but about citizen participation and engagement: the Catalan Government shares knowledge in social networking sites where people can participate and engage in collaborative work: communities of practice, social aggregators, etc..
The e-Catalunya project now holds +15,000 members in 54 big groups/categories and several dozen specific working groups.
Q&A
Idoia Llano: How is the Government of Catalonia’s blog going to be managed? Jordi Graells: It is not exactly the Government’s blog, but the “blog of the Internet experience of the Government”. It will be a corporate blog, not a blog (or a collection of blogs) of the members of the Government. So, it will be like any other communication channel.
Ricard Espelt: How is it, if open data and open platforms have such benefits, that Governments do not use them? Why Governments keep on using customized and closed applications instead of already existing “cloud” applications? Jordi Graells: Security is an issue. An other one is political show off (e.g. it’s “better” a good huge portal, rather than small spread applications that don’t even hold the institution’s logo).
Agustí Cerrillo: technologically speaking reuse of public information is possible and, increasingly, the law has also been updated this way. But it is not this way at the organizational level. So, what organizational change should take place? Jordi Graells: Communities of practice are proving to be a good driver for change. Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: it is very important to convince the leaders, and to do it through small successes and benchmarking others’ small successes. José Manuel Alonso: Act on a two-level basis: at the higher direction basis, agreeing on political strategies; and at the implementation and most operative basis, agreeing on the how-tos.
Ismael Peña-López: In a welfare state like ours, why should I participate and “work for the government”, if I already pay my taxes? Why should I if I won’t change the world? Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: It’s about small but really effective changes, especially in those places where resources are really scarce and small projects can have huge impact.
Marta Cantijoch: Aren’t we promoting a new digital divide — accompanied by a democratic divide — where people that can code, understand the new “sharing paradigm”, etc. can participate in this open society and the rest of the citizenry will be set aside? José Manuel Alonso: The idea is not the creation of a new elite of citizens, but to enable a new set of infomediaries that can provide more and better public services for the citizen. Jordi Graells: These new services that José Manuel Alonso refers to can be new cultural services, learning and research materials, weather data, more and better communication channels, etc.
Q: How can we encourage participation? Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: Historically, participation has been limited to sending out ideas and vote them, which is not really encouraging. If the Administration allows for a creation of new public services, new public value, the citizenry should be more eager to participate as their impact would be much higher.
Q: We should be aware of the risks of sharing information, especially private information. How do we avoid these risks? Jordi Graells: There seems to be an increasing trend towards a genuine change that needs to be managed, but that seems unstoppable.
