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Designing for e-Democracy in Australia

Vienna.
My paper is in the next session at EDEM 2009, but we start with a paper by another Australian-based researcher, Mary Griffiths. She begins by highlighing the extremely broad range of digital media channels which are now available to users (in Australia and elsewhere) to engage with each other and with various organisations and institutions. There's only limited research at this point which provides a full picture of this digital landscape, and the visions which emerge of it so far remain quite utopian.

Web 2.0 cuts across these different areas, and there is a great deal of hope for social media, societal change, and e-democracy developments. But the difficulty is that in business and the corporate world there is an uncomplicated sense of this fragmentary landscape; the diverging agendas and the diverse literacies of users within this environment are not fully recognised. It's a substantial distance from Web 1.0 to full online engagement and content creation; indeed, not all these literacies may matter to citizens engaging with one another in political deliberation.

Connective power creates different kinds of relationships and communities; we are still apprentices in digital culture and learning how to implement the core principles we might want to see in our online communities. Citizen Journalism and blogging, for example is being hyped as a key element in this mix; but it may be far from central to the overall democratic landscape. In the US, clearly such sites are making an impact on the political process; there are a few of these in Australia as well - but while there's a lot of sound here, who is listening?

Other technologies (e.g. Twitter) are similarly being hyped, but what are people actually doing online, and what impact does it have on politics? Mary points also to social media sites such as Flickr - what about the political role of such user involvement, and highlights the (for me, highly questionable) view of Matthew Hindman that online, there is a winner-takes-all pattern which leads to a focus on a small number of major voices.

Mary now points to last December's Australian federal government's Digital Economy blog as an example in the Australian context (which I'll also speak about in my paper). This was a two-week trial which met with only limited success, partly probably due to design issues; its contributions regularly went off-topic to deal with other issues (which may be a democratic literacy/argumentation issue but was also driven by the wider political context in Australia). Mary now runs us through an outline of the substantial number of off-topic comments within this blog - this could simply indicate literacy deficits, but may instead well point to the intense public interest in engaging with the government on topics other than those chosen by the government itself: a digital communications literacy issue on the side of the government rather than of the users...

This year, the government has set up a number of task forces, on transparency and openness and e-participation. This might mean that government has now moved back from an 'anyone can contribute' model, and may reflect an understanding that the government blog format itself is unworkable in its present form. There's a 'genre baggage' for blogs, which gives greater voice to a certain type of contributor than to reasoned, logical debate, Mary suggests.

So, what knowledge, protocols, and online formats would better enable a civil and confident online policy debate between citizens on controversial topics? This could be researched for example in the context of the continuing debate around photos of children online (from family photos to artistic work to child pornography); what online spaces could be established to discuss this? The space may need to be somewhere between an e-learning and an online thinking space; it could involve 'citizen juries' on specific topics, moderated discussions, draft policy wikis, links to relevant news and research materials, and multimedia resources providing expert knowledge.

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