Blog

Vienna.


The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Cornelia Wagner, examining the social acceptability of e-voting in the context of the recent student council elections in Austria. There is a continuing battle between promoters and sceptics in this context, citing the opportunities for better citizen consultation as well as the lack of trust in e-initiatives in support of their arguments, and Cornelia suggests that bottom-up approaches, trust in these systems, and early adoption are paramount for overcoming some of these problems.

Vienna.


The final speaker in this EDEM 2009 session is Vitaliy Lipen from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, who shifts our interest to the remote verification of electronic voting. There has been a substantial amount of work done on systems for electronic voting in Belarus already,and such systems have been trialled in a number of countries (for example in Kazachstan, if less so in Belarus itself).

There is only moderate readiness for full e-voting implementation in Belarus and other countries of the former Soviet Union, due to the limited infrastructure, and this compares also with other nations with infrastructural deficits. Even so, Kazachstan showed a 30% patricipation rate for e-voting,which compares favourably with more ICT-developed nations such as Estonia (where 7% of the population voted electronically) or Germany (where the electronic vote trial in 2005 was annulled subsequently). Electors remain concerned about their privacy, and electronic elections tend to offer even less transparency than traditional paper ballots; however, the paper voting trail is difficult for voters to track, too.

Vienna.


The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Lucie Langer, who presents a new protocol for secure online elections that emerged from the German Voteremote project (for non-parliamentary, non-political voting). Key requirements in this context are security, democracy, accuracy, fairness, and verifiability (for individual voters and at a universal level), of course; in addition, the system must be free of receipts which can be used by the voter to document how they voted (and thus could be used by them to sell their vote), and resistant to voter coercion. Further, of course, the system needs to be scalable, robust, and easy to use.

Vienna.


The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Christoph Eckl and Robert Müller-Török, who begin by pointing out the difficulties involved in establishing an e-voting project. Such projects are complex because of the applicable legal frameworks, the software required (and the approval and certification processes surrounding it), the need to engage in PR exercises to promote public acceptance of e-voting, and the stringent project management requirements which such a project therefore entails.

There have been a number of unsuccessful e-voting processes in recent years (turning in some cases into re-voting where legal challenges were successful) - there was limited participation, there were legal and political attacks, and there were negative reports from election observers. As we've already heard in other presentations, at least one Supreme Court challenge against e-voting has been successful (in Germany), setting back progress towards e-voting substantially.

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.

Vienna.


The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Peter Cruickshank, whose interest is in e-petitions as well and is working with the EuroPetition system. The aims here are to integrate e-petitions across Europe, from local through to European level; e-petitioning is comparatively mature already as a process, and exists in a gap between representative and direct democracy - it represents a kind of advocacy democracy whose outcomes are eventually mediated by politicians. Fairness and openness have to be seen to be working in order not to put users off.

Vienna.


The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Dan Cartwright, whose interest is in argumentation processes in e-democracy projects. Decision-making through public consultation is a key part of e-democracy, of course, and there are various systems to engage citizens in such processes online; many of these are limited in their effectiveness, however.

One such approach are e-petitions, as introduced for example in the UK; typically, sites allow users to create and 'sign' e-petitions, but this provides no information on which part of the petition a particular signatory may agree with if multiple justifications for the petition are provided. One way to overcome this problem is the implementation of argument visualisation sytems such as Araucaria and decision support systems such as Zeno, which convert textual argument into a visual representation of the argument logic; however, these are difficult to use for the lay user.

Vienna.


The final speaker for this EDEM 2009 session is Blaž Golob, who shifts our focus to developments in e-democracy in South-East Europe. The Centre for e-Governance Development in South-East Europe include the regional coperation council, various governments from the region, university organisations, and technology partners; it aims to achieve the successful development of an information society in the region which will contribute to the future of Europe. It supports the rapid development of the 12 SEE countries, and does so by focussing on e-democracy as one of the seven pillars of the information society (the others are e-government, e-business, e-education, e-health, e-justice, and e-security).

Vienna.


We continue the Austrian focus at EDEM 2009 with Peter Parycek, one of the academics involved in the Austrian e-Democracy initiatives. He suggests that we're in the midst of a new media revolution towards a networked society,driven by digitisation, convergence, and the shift to many-to-many communication; this turns the Net into a social space, and changes our patterns of communication and organisation - the 2008 Obama campaign is a very good example for this.

In politics, advertising, and many other areas, word of mouth has become key in influencing public opinion - this is a shift from hierarchical to networked organisation, and the question now becomes whether we will be able to utilise these new patterns of the network society in government as well. An answer to this is provided by the emerging principles of open 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.