Notes from the EDem10 — 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010, at the Danube-University Krems, and held in Krems, Austria, on May 6th and 7th, 2010. More notes on this event: edem10.
Communications: e-Democracy
Župa – Grassroots Democracy Revolution on the Web
Alois Paulin
We have to find out a way to get rid of inefficiencies, lobby-influenced politicians or sheer corruption in governments.
The Župa — slavic for community — model aims at reducing the size of the government through an intensive usage of Information and Communication Technologies.
You can set up a profile (with your blog, ideas, etc.) and be elected as anyone’s candidate.
[this projecte reminds me of something Ethan Zuckerman explained to me two years ago]
E-Parliaments and novel Parliament-to-Citizen Services: An initial Overview and Proposal
Aspasia Papaloi and Dimitris Gouscos
Age group parliaments, social parliaments, thematic parliaments, alternative or counter parliaments, etc. have been initiatives to open up parlaments.
e-Parliaments are a new way, supported by ICTs, to open up the parliaments to their citizens.
IPU guidelines for parliamentary websites (2009). And a survey shows that the members of parliament mainly use digital assistants, laptops and mobiles.
Examples of activities taken up in e-Parliaments include participatory budgeting.
For these to work there is needed: political will, strategy planning, etc.
European Status of E-Participation and what is needed to optimise future Benefits?
Jeremy Millard and Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
eParticipation initiatives are quite common all along the European Union, and they are especially relevant at the local level. And while eParticipation initiatives are important too at the national level, we still find crossborder initiatives, aiming at people that communte between countries, are immigrants within Europe, etc.
At the local level, e-Participation initiatives have much more users (in % of the targeted population) and participation decreases as we move up in the scale of the government (regional, national, international, etc.), though the latter are better funded than the former.
Among the tools, e-Voting or e-Petitioning are in the lower end of usage, being websites in the upper part. It is surprising that voting has such a poor importance in these initiatives.
How to optimise e-Participation?
- Formalise and mainstream e-Participation as part of a coordinated ‘open engagement policy’.
- Help establish or support independent, neutral trusted third party service for e-Participation.
- Governments/institutions should listen to and provide frameworks for building citizen participation from the bottom (but not control it).
- Unleash the empowering potential of easy to use Public Sector Information for re-use in machine-readable format.
- Empower the civil servant.
Other reactions on this session
- EDem10 – Day 2 – #1
- Župa: Making Democratic Society Machine-Readable
- New Opportunities for e-Enabled Parliaments
- Strategies for Strengthening e-Participation in Europe
