Recommendations for e-Democracy from the Council of Europe

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Michael Remmert from the Council of Europe, who heads its "Good Governance in the Information Society" project. The CoE is a pan-European organisation with 47 member states, founded in 1949, and is distinct from the European Union; the only European country currently missing from the CoE is Belarus (which still has some democratic deficits, of course).

Recent work in the CoE has especially highlighted the role of ICTs and the information society in democratic practice, and the CoE has recently published a detailed set of recommendations on e-democracy, following earlier recommendations on e-governance and e-voting. Such recommendations, while not binding, are being used and implemented by the various CoE member states. The recommendations are also accompanied by a set of generic tools for e-democracy initiatives, as well as roadmaps and checklists for the introduction of e-democracy and specific tools, and for the evaluation of e-democracy initiatives.

The e-democracy recommendations include general concepts and considerations, outline different sectors of e-democracy, examine relevant technologies, provide for steps for the introduction of e-democracy, examine enablers, challenges, barriers and risks, and explore rules and regulatory frameworks. They point out that e-democracy is not a novel form of democracy and must not replace conventional democracy, but aims to enhance it; it facilitates democratic engagement and deliberation and improves accessibility and inclusiveness. So, it is complementary to traditional processes and opens opportunities for participation and a reinvigoration of traditional democracy as well as reviewing traditional concepts. This may also help to rekindle citizens' declining interest in politics and create new possibilities for civic initiatives.

Challenges in this process need to be clear to stakeholders, who need to facilitate accessibility and inclusion, guarantee the use of the contributions made by individual participants, involve all interested parties from an early stage, develop inclusive instruments for e-democracy, encourage public authorities to support civic initiatives, and pay attention to the risks associated with the presentation of fallacious and undesirable information.

There is a detailed CoE 'map of modern democracy' in the new Modern Democracy magazine (pp. 8-9 in the PDF if you follow the link); on this basis, future work is necessary which promotes the application of the recommendations and indicative guides, translates the recommendations to the various member states' languages, uses the recommendations as a basis for customised checklists, codes of practice, and other instruments for the evaluation of specific initiatives, and explores the need for further rules and regulatory frameworks.

More broadly, it is important to do more work aimed at understanding the implications of e-democracy on democratic processes, at seeking ways to support and harness bottom-up e-democracy, at collecting examples for good practice on and evaluating e-consultation, and at organising biennial meetings to review developments in e-democracy and the application of the recommendations.

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