Government

Vienna.
The second and last day at EDEM 2009 starts with a paper by Christian Rupp from the Austrian Federal Chancellery, who begins by noting the changing role of ICTs in government. ICTs have initially been used to increase efficiency and effectiveness, but more recently the focus has been on improving governance, raising dilemmas of balancing openness and transparency. Austria is in a good position for e-government as there's a relatively strong ICT base and level of digital literacy; also, the federal structure of administration here means that e-government is distributed across all three levels of government rather than taking place only at the national level.

Vienna.
Finally for this first day at EDEM 2009 we move to Sabrina Franceschini and Roberto Zarro, who present on e-democracy initiatives in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy. The region set up its first participatory project, Partecipa.net, in September 2005, running to October 2007. It aimed to define and create participation processes in an integrated manner in the region, to promote participation not only towards citizens but also within the administration itself, to provide a tool for all administrative levels, and to define, test, and disseminate the methodology. It created a committed working community, an e-democracy project in the Partecipa site itself, and it managed to implement and test the participation kit.

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is César Alfaro, who shifts our interest to projects for participatory budgeting in the UK, Spain, and Brazil. Such projects aim to involve citizens in budgetting decisions, based on dialogue and participation. This was trialled first (offline) in 1988 in a number of Brazilian cities, and is now in place in some 100 municipalities in Europe, involving some 4 million citizens; the UK is likely to implement participatory budgetting in 2012. However, the models uses differ substantially, on the percentage of the budget which has been allocated to such models, on the number of participants and the structure of participation, on the number of discussion and approval rounds and their rules, etc.

Vienna.
The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Michael Milakovich, who returns us to that question of citizen participation in e-democratic environments. So far, the overall lesson is probably that 'we've built it,but they haven't come yet' - and yet, in the US, online media were certainly used very effectively to help win an online election in the 2008 presidential elections, while the classic citizen participation model - the town hall meetings - are now being used and abused for partisan agitation.

This is an issue not least of digital democratic literacy; the use of social media and other electronic technologies remains in its infancy. There are issues with competing communication systems (used differently across different generations, but not neatly so), and the respective electoral structures also play a role in what e-democracy frameworks are appropriate (e-participation may loook differently in a direct democratic system than in the US electoral college framework, for example). Additionally, there are public concerns about the equation of politics with administration, and questions about the distribution of citizen and government responsibilities.

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 was me, and I think it went pretty well. The third person in our session was missing, so we managed to have 30 minutes of good discussion afterwards. Here's my Powerpoint, and the full paper; I'll add the audio when I can... I've now added the audio, too.

Technorati : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media
Del.icio.us : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media

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.

Vienna.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2009 session is conference organiser Alexander Prosser, whose focus is on a recent ruling related to e-voting by the German Federal Constitutional Court that raised questions about transparency in e-voting. In 2008, for example, 200 e-votes disappeared in a Finnish election; in 2007, software support in a UK election staff manually edited ballots as they would not fit into the counting software, and key processes were performed on vendor-supplied notebooks; in Australian student union elections in 2009, a harddrive with e-voting data needed to be protected by firefighters (hm?) as it was taken to an erasure service, as it would have allowed matching voters and their votes - so questions about transparency and accountability in e-voting are certainly very real.

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Matt Poelmans from the Dutch Burgerlink initiative. He begins by suggesting the e-participation is a prerequisite for a mature form of e-government, and that do date, the citizen is the missing link in this picture. Well beyond e-anything, there is a need to relink citizens and government - and this is a challenge which is at least two millennia old.

In the Netherlands, there is a Burgerlink (i.e. Citizenlink) project aimed at improving public performance by involving citizens in innovative ways; it runs from 2008 to 2010 and aims to design and develop basic infrastructure for cooperation between all levels of government. The project aims to deliver generic components and standards compliant with the Dutch Interoperability Framework. This involves promoting service quality (through an e-citizen charter and a service quality code), measuring customer satisfaction (based on a study of life events and delivery chains), and stimulating citizen involvement (through the development of e-participation instruments).

Vienna.
The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Alexander Leiningen-Westerburg from Siemens, who consequently shifts our attention to the vendors of e-voting services. He notes the very delicate questions around e-voting, and suggests that success or failure of individual implementations affects every vendor in the market. But how much of a market is there, anyway - what are the advantages of e-voting? One promise is an increase in the voter participation, but so far there is little evidence for this. Another is that more expatriots are likely to participate in e-voting (especially in major emigration countries, such as those of eastern Europe), but again, the evidence so far is limited.

Vienna.
The third speaker in this opening session at EDEM 2009 is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose theme is the demise of electronic government (hmm, that didn't take long...). He suggests that e-government as a concept has come to the end of its lifespan; the promises of higher public sector efficiency, and of resulting economic growth and greater trust in government, and of deeper citizen participation in public matters have not been fulfilled. The reality of electronic government is far less promising; the economic gains remain unclear, and have yet to be measured accurately - there are no robust frameworks for such measurement at this point. We measure not what we should, but what we can measure: avoidance. That's not helpful.