[atlarge-discuss] FYI: Int'l Teledemocracy Centre, eDemocracy and a London event

[espresso@e-scape.net]

Extracted from the

* E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN. 
The Email Newsletter On Electronic Government,
UK And Worldwide.

(<egovbulletin-subscribe@headstar.com> for the plain text, and
http://www.headstar.com/egb )

* ISSUE 122, FRIDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2002.

[big snip]

* A VOTE FOR SCOTTISH YOUTH.

In early October, 15,000 young people from the Scottish Highlands will cast electronic votes for candidates for Highland Youth Voice, an online parliament with 75 seats that debates health, crime, education and
transport issues and has regular consultations with the Scottish Parliament.

Candidates were nominated earlier this week by 29 secondary schools in the Highlands, following initial election processes at each school. Highland Youth Voice (http://www.highlandyouthvoice.org) recently held a debate on how to increase youth involvement in sports activities and will next tackle crime and transport issues.

The organisation, which is sponsored by government and health service agencies and supported by the International Teledemocracy Centre at Glasgow's Napier University (http://itc.napier.ac.uk), has previously
addressed Scottish national conferences on health and culture issues and met with members of the Scottish Executive.

[big snip]

* SECTION TWO: DEBATE REPORT
- VOXPOLITICS.

PARTICIPATION AND REALITY.
by Dan Jellinek  dan@headstar.com

E-democracy experts, politicians, civil servants and academics were among the crowd at a packed meeting convened earlier this month by the online campaigns body VoxPolitics to debate the government's new consultation paper on e-democracy (see http://www.edemocracy.gov.uk).

The technology writer and commentator Bill Thompson opened the meeting by saying the government needed to start by looking at how we can revitalise democracy, and then look at how technology might be able to help with bits and pieces, rather than starting by assuming technology would itself be able to revitalise democracy.

Sian Kevill heads the BBC's New Politics Initiative, which has been tasked with drawing together elements of the BBC's output in innovative new ways to refresh its political coverage, particularly for a younger audience.

She told the meeting that the current widespread failure of large parts of society to engage in or show any interest in the democratic process was largely due to a feeling of powerlessness on behalf of individuals.
"People ask 'what can I do on my own? Nobody will listen to me.' They also don't know how to begin to engage with the government or politicians. And finally, they feel nothing would happen anyway," she said.

Broadcasters and in particular the BBC could play a key role in addressing some of these problems, Kevill said. For example, they could help explain in simple terms what people can do to engage with the system; and they could tailor more of their output to addressing people's needs and wishes, as determined by a continual process of public consultation.

Internet consultant David Brake told the meeting that unofficial outlets for public debate are just as important as official ones (see also section three, this issue, where Brake develops this theme). In particular he said 'weblogs' – the free-form, interactive online diaries that have become something of a craze in recent years – demonstrated that the web was becoming the natural home to unlimited freedom of expression. Brake runs his own acclaimed weblog at http://blog.org

Another debater pointed out that it is not just brand new technologies that can be used to revitalise democracy, but 'nearly-new' technologies such as telephone call centres as well. "We need to think not so much in terms of e-democracy, as multi-channel democracy or modernising government", said Rhion Jones of Dialogue Data Management.

The issue of webcasting of democratic meetings (see also E-Government Bulletin, issues 120 and 121) was raised by Mathew Jellings of UKCouncil. He said webcasting with an interactive element was useful as it gave people a chance to maintain their anonymity and allow them to couch questions in their own time, putting less pressure on people than if they were attending a council meeting in person.

Richard Stubbs of Newham Online said one of the difficulties with any online policy consultation with government was the fact that government's view of what had happened when in a policy debate tended to be spun to fit in with their own political imperatives.

"The government spins, it reinvents the past. What guarantee is there that when an online policy debate has taken place, history will not be reinvented by the government, and that the policy process is and will always be a shared reality?"

This point was answered in part by Professor Stephen Coleman of the Hansard Society, who pointed out e-democracy was actually not about government at all, but about Parliament.

Last year Coleman, with fellow academic Jay Blumler, mooted the concept of an 'online civic commons', a new independent virtual debating and consultation chamber aimed at boosting public input into democracy (see `Realising democracy online' at: http://www.citizensonline.org.uk/publications.shtml).

This radical concept will be among many that civil servants and ministers will now ponder as the consultation period on the government's first e-democracy green paper draws to a close at the end of next month.

[Section two ends.]


* SPECIAL NOTICE: E-DEMOCRACY EXCHANGE.

The publishers of E-Government Bulletin are hosting the e-Democracy Exchange in London on 19 November to discuss the use of technology to engage the public in the democratic process.

Speakers include Dr Ken Ritchie, chief executive, Electoral Reform Society; Peter Livesey, assistant director of e-democracy, Office of the e-Envoy; David McElhinney, executive director, Liverpool City Council; 
Alan Winchcombe, electoral services manager, Swindon Borough Council; 
James Crabtree, The Work Foundation; 
and Dan Jellinek, editor of E-Government Bulletin.

Bulletin readers can register at a 50 per cent discount by writing the word 'bulletin' after their surnames on the registration form at:
http://www.electronic-government.com/e-democracy.htm

[Special notice ends.]


* SECTION THREE: OPINION
- E-DEMOCRACY.

BEYOND GOVERNMENT.
by David Brake

It is gratifying, with the publication of the new consultation paper on e-democracy, to see the government expressing an interest in using new technologies not just for e-voting but as a way of involving the public
more broadly in the democratic system.

If new technologies are to have a positive effect, however, it is not sufficient merely to provide an email address or website for each parliamentary sub-committee.

A three stage process is required. First, people need to be guided to the places where their participation will count. Second, they need to understand how what they say makes a difference (and how, in some cases, it may not). And third, to break through the atmosphere of apathy and cynicism that characterises many people's attitude to the democratic process, they need to be shown repeatedly how ordinary people working within the system are able to make a difference.

Imagine for a moment you are an entrepreneurial Scot interested in encouraging local businesses to recycle more. You might want to contact your local council, and you could write to your MP but would you have the
time to research the position of the Scottish Assembly? The regional development board? The European Union? The DTI? How much money do these bodies have to spend in your area, how difficult will it be to get their attention and how likely are they in the end to get involved?

Faced with such complexities is it any wonder that people interested in tackling a problem look instead to single issue organisations like Greenpeace to represent their interests.

While naturally enough e-democracy campaigners want to proclaim successes, these are hard to find. Trials of postal ballots have had much more effect on voter turnouts than experiments with e-voting.

The Number 10 website's take on e-consultation (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page598.asp) is that
if you make an e-petition and gather 300 signatures, you will get a mention of your petition on the site and a brief response from the relevant department. Unfortunately, the website doesn't actually let browsers know
what the original petition was, so you can't even rely on it to give free publicity to your cause. There have only been six such petitions in the past 17 months.

At present, potential participants have to figure out the legislative system for themselves to determine when and where they can be consulted on the issues they care about. Where feedback is possible, it is not clear whether anyone with decision-making power is listening, and if they are how important an individual's view is compared to the views of corporations or lobby groups.

What should the government do about this? Well, the 'life episodes' approach of UK Online is certainly the right idea. As well as providing information structured in the traditional form -"here is where you can provide feedback to the draft Communications bill CM 5508-I" - the government could guide the citizen through the process using a simple expert system - "What aspect of government policy are you interested in? Local government is responsible for X, your MP is responsible for Y, Europe has this policy - and you can
reach them all this way."

While it is laudable that the government is considering running its own online message boards across a broad range of sites to facilitate consultation, I fear this would put them in an impossible position, as the
difficulties experienced with UK Online's Citizenspace debating area have already proven.

They would be considered irresponsible if they failed to monitor the message boards to ensure that obscene, racist and other 'difficult' speech is purged from their site, but this can easily be presented by others as the
government "censoring free speech". It also means that the government will tend to concentrate on its own discussion groups and ignore thriving discussions happening elsewhere.

I would suggest that the government instead encourages third party sites to set up their own debates on a given subject, links to them directly from its own pages and participates directly if the number of participants exceeds a certain threshold. As a service to the public (and to cover itself) it could label the discussions it links to as either 'moderated', for BBC-style moderation; 'lightly moderated' for lighter moderation which only removes the most offensive stuff but might allow swearing for example; or 'unmoderated'. It could also give browsers a rough idea of how busy a particular forum is, and whether it is merely being monitored by the government or whether they are participating.

It should also always make clear who from the government is either reading the boards directly or reading summaries, and what their powers are. And when a decision is made and online discussion helped to inform that decision, it is vital that this information is also highlighted in whatever report is published.

The policy consultation asks whether key individuals in government responsible for a given policy should be individually addressable. While this is superficially appealing, it risks over-loading the people responsible. It also ironically reduces openness and transparency as messages sent directly to the government can't be seen or discussed by other interested parties. Of course there may still be a place for anonymous contributions (and people can always post anonymously to message boards) but it is best where possible that all contributions to a debate can be read by all participants.

Of course, the "solution" to e-participation doesn't lie largely with government, since the public by and large doesn't trust the government to deliver it. For e-participation to become widely valued, it needs to be well-signposted by existing media outlets.

Organisations like the BBC and newspapers like the Guardian could have an important role to play here in providing a more complete guide to the political process than the government could provide. They could guide people wanting to make a difference to the right body - whether this meant using the government's own process or joining (or forming) a pressure group. 'CitizensConnection.net'
(http://www.citizensconnection.net) from the independent educational organisation Common Purpose is an excellent example that is already up and running.

The government's e-democracy initiative could consider itself a success when independent third parties started suggesting it would be more effective to participate in online debate than to take to the streets. And if people found that an easier route to existing systems of consultation still didn't result in change, they might be more willing to push for the kind of broader democratic reform that cyber-utopians crave.

NOTE: David Brake http://davidbrake.org is a journalist and an Internet consultant specialising in the public
and voluntary sectors. He manages a weblog at http://blog.org

[Section three ends.]

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Judyth Mermelstein     "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC           <espresso@e-scape.net>
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"A word to the wise is sufficient. For others, use more."
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