e-Democracy in Austria

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.

Within the Austrian federal government, there is a Digital Austria Board which coordinates activities and includes stakeholders from all levels of government as well as chambers of commerce, law, and other industry areas, and universities. The legal basis for this is the 2004 e-Government Act which manages electronic communication between citizens, public administrations, and business; also into play in this context comes the Data Protection Act of 2002 which also governs the Austrian citizen ID card system (and related systems such as bank cards, health insurance cards affinity cards) and wider electronic signature and authentication systems. This also ties into the Austrian central register of residence.

The government has also developed a number of open source tools, for identification, signature verification, mass signatures, and electronic delivery. Government information and services are provided through the central Help.gv.at portal, which has operated since 1997; it receives some 15,000 visitors per day, accessing some 110,000 documents per day and involving some 200 content partners. Help partners with the Austrian municipalities, who also provide some of this material through their own portals; the information resides in a central repository, however, and is simply provided through the differently skinned interfaces of the various municipalities.

There are various levels of participation identified here: information (a one-way relationship), consultation (a two-way relationship with citizens), and active participation (based on partnership, where citizens actively engage in agenda setting). e-Voting has begun to be trialled first in the context of the recent student parliament elections; here, only 1-2% (2,000 students) ended up voting electronically.

So, there is now an e-Democracy working group which has developed a roadmap for further development, with four key building blocks - strategy, tools, processes, and modules. Key aims of the strategy are to increase transparency and traceability, e-participation and communication, etc.; tools will involve the Council of Europe CAHDE tool box, and adapt it to Austrian legal frameworks; processes and modules are beginning to be defined. There is also a wiki space to track this work, at www.ag.bka.gv.at.

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