New Opportunities for e-Enabled Parliaments

Krems.
The next EDEM 2010 speaker is Aspasia Papaloi, who begins by exploring the meaning of the parliamentary institution - its various roles in democratic society. Today, in addition to conventional national parliaments, there are also a range of additional parliament-style initiatives - such as age-group (e.g. youth) parliaments, social parliaments (e.g. defined by specific socioeconomic factors), thematic parliaments (around specific issues), or other alternative parliaments.

Some of these also operate as e-parliaments, and there are now various guidelines for appropriate parliamentary Websites, and a range of models describing standard parliament-to-parliament, parliament-to-citizen, and citizen-to-parliament services; in addition, a range of novel e-parliament services are being explored - for example, tools for visualising discussion processes in order to better understand the range of viewpoints which are being expressed.

One exciting possibility here would be to combine such discussion visualisation technologies with youth parliaments, for example, in order to better educate young participants about the processes of parliamentary discussion; another opportunity would be to combine e-rulemaking and participatory budgetting with social or thematic parliaments, in order to enable such specific parliamentary communities to develop real outcomes. Such initiatives require strategic planning, user surveys, appropriate resourcing, and strong political support, however.

Technorati : EDEM 2010, democracy, parliament, participation, social media
Del.icio.us : EDEM 2010, democracy, parliament, participation, social media