ICT 2008 :: Networking sessions
eGovernance and eParticipation
Saint Clair 1, 27/11/2008 (11:00-12:30)
New Internet technology addressing societal challenges and driving changes in governance and democratic participation
The public sector is faced with challenges resulting from new Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 tools, and other evolving social networking and semantic-based tools, combined with large-scale societal problems. New governance models require advanced e-governance toolboxes to facilitate and incorporate the input of all types of stakeholders in decision- and policy-making through secure mass co-operation platforms and other consultative systems. Tools are also needed to link citizen and business inputs with the more formal participatory processes and networks. This session will examine how ICT can be used to empower all societal actors to be directly and effectively engaged, and the new governance models needed to accommodate this.
Coordinator: Maria A. WIMMER (University of Koblenz-Landau, Institute for IS research - Research Group eGovernment, Germany)
Links and Documents
- Agenda (52 KB)
- Speakers already offered for the eGovernance and eParticiption networking session proposal (92 KB)
- eGovRTD2020 project results (book)
Comments
24 comments
Comments are closed.
Linking bottom-up and top-down participatory processes is certainly a key contemporary challenge, and I hope the term policy and decision-making is defined broadly, recognising that new governance models do not necessarily coalesce around government actors.
An complementary challenge for such toolboxes could be to ensure that citizens' participation in the public debate automatically feeds the policy making at all government levels, without the citizen having to know about which government body handles what.
It would also be interesting to discuss methods how to effectively incorporate existing tools into existing political frameworks and decision-making processes.
Transparancy remains an ideal. New technologies provide opportunities but should be used in such a way that transparancy is created instead of a huge information overload.
This is certainly a challenge for the European Information Society - merging top-down and bottom-up approaches concerns not only what is in the toolbox but how it is designed and shared. (And this was my intended comment, while the three almost identical ones above were the result of slow feedback from not-very-functional technology!)
For me, the research in technologies of opinion mining and text mining for exploiting the existing unstructured information in different media is an exciting opportunity to tackle next generation tools and methods in eParticipation and policy making
This is an essential area of research and should be prioritised. ICT is already dramatically changing the way people participate, but we really have no idea what the implications are for democracy and governance. Without this research we risk the technology becoming our master in this area, rather than a very useful and powerful servant.
Very interesting session.
eGovernance and eParticipation can be seen as two sides of one medal. Maybe there are still just the two surfaces available and maybe the medal between these two surfaces is still missing and has to be set up. We have to bring together these two surfaces and to put substantial matter between these two sides to form a unique system of eGovernance and eParticipation. New and exiting technologies of semantic categorisation , clustering and knowledge mining can be the technical basis for a complete new Governance model which interlinks participation and governance directly and brings us forward a first step to new stages of a democratic society.
I would suggest discussing the egosta-Framework & Project within the workshop:
Topic: Stakeholder eParticipation in big eGovernment projects.
These projects have stakeholders to be involved; this to bring in their needs and ideas, to ensure benefit for the stakeholders, acceptance, take-up rates and project success in general.
Results:
1.) eParticipation Toolbox based on Web 2.0 technologies for active stakeholder participation (blogs, discussion fora, wikis for elaborating stakeholder positions)
2.) eParticipation Analysis Tool for semantic categorisation, clustering and analyzing masses of eParticipation artefacts by Knowledge Mining & Knowledge Discovery etc.
3.) organisational guidelines how to implement and run the eParticipation Toolbox and the eParticipation Analysis Tool
4.) good practice case in the PEPPOL.AT project „VCD: Virtual Company Dossier“
egosta is a national complementary to the PEPPOL-Project (http://www.peppol.eu/) within CIP.
Project Start: Sept. 2008, Duration: 30 month
eParticipation, and especially those political, is only a social noise, if not complemented with: 1.responsiveness of structures in power; 2. transparent mechanisms for a social control of governance; 3. with tools for corrective actions, based on regular evaluation of inputs from citizens. It seems that all points have their socio-political and ICT aspects, but where do we have to discuss the cross-topics of governance process transformation issues? Is it possible at this session?
Adaptability represents the most promising solution to the contradiction between striving to achieve cost-savings, and high quality. Of course e-Governance need to give PA the opportunity to change the way of think about their structure and activities. Very interesting session.
I will definitely attend this session cause it is very much in line with the professional work on policy support I have been conducting over the last 6 years.
I will attend this session to introduce how eGovernance and eParticipation is connected with eEnvironment (Electronic access to environmental information} as an important fundament for eDemocracy and environmental protection.
To suggest how ICT can be used to empower all societal actors to be directly and effectively involved in policy and decision-making. One of the main contributions might come from how one can organize projects and need initiated research. Involvment of different groups like citizens, employees, suppliers might be crucial. To bring in experiences from project forms like living labs, needs initiated research and targeted networks with different stakeholders would indeed be interesting!
eGovernmemnt and eParticipation policies need to take up to improve the overall efficiency and accountability systems, and concerning Citizens participation, they need a link to taxation-benefit policies.
Despite de great number of applications in the private sector, it's clear that governments have other specific needs. I would really like to hear what they are and how they could be addressed, since I believe current status is not enough for governments to use many of them. Distance between policy and tools is till too long.
Do we yet know when that session will take place? Thanks and regards.
Interesting session, especially for non memeber and new member states.
In presented area of RTD it looks that " facilitate and incorporate the input of all types of stakeholders in decision and policy making through mass cooperation platforms" would be one of main impact – I should like to participate on session.
An interesting session, that is likely to spawn new ideas... The toolbox with a Web 2.0 (or 3.0) should also take into account synchronous, structured collaboration.
Very interesting session from all means but I am afraid it is far from the reality. I am not against it but when we talk about e-government we mean the government, and the government is usually managed by a bunch of bureaucrats, where most of them are absolutely looses unable to get a job or to be productive. Well, those looses hire other looses which run the public sector initiatives, ministers, secretariats, etc, and not only that, the block all the innovative ideas, or young and enthusiastic people willing to contribute. So taking this chance I believe that everything that will be discussed will remain laboratory experiments and election campaign announcements. On the other hand I can not be opposed to the development of the eGoverment vision but so far I am deeply disappointed in many countries I had the chance to present such projects. I am looking forward to listen to the interesting contributions of this session
A very important session.
I am writing during the session. Very interested session indeed.
We have been exploring participation issues for a long time, both by approaches for understanding and stimulate participation in online communities (and more recently in the Web 2.0), the notion of social attention (and social interaction overload), as well as the use of serious games as more engaging user's interaction experiences.
Ref: Social motivation (in the web 2.0):
http://www.calt.insead.edu/Encyclopedia/?social%20motivation