Government

Krems.
The second presentation in this session at CeDEM 2011 is by Elin Wihlborg, whose focus is on a specific case study of e-democracy practices in a Swedish municipality – focussing in this case on reasons for failure, which are just as important to investigate as obvious successes. We need to start, though, by considering the concept of ‘democracy’ in the first place, which is often glossed over – it’s about forming a demos through finding a common ethos and participating in an inclusive fashion, and about kratia: thinking through the exercising of power.

What happens when we add ‘e-’ …

Krems.
The next session at CeDEM 2011 starts with Francesco Molinari. His interest is in the processes of institutionalising e-participation in Europe. There is an enormous amount of information, evidence, and outcomes from a wide range of e-participation projects in the EU – how can we learn from them and develop more systematic approaches within European and member state institutions? What role does the researcher and practitioner community play in this?

The story begins with the EU e-participation Preparatory Action, which set up 30 pilot sites in 18 EU member states and engaged 100,000 citizens. 50 public sector entities were …

Krems.
The second speaker in this morning session at CeDEM 2011 is Sara Tavazzi, who works in the Italian region of Tuscany. She’s introducing a network of assisted access points to citizen services called PAAS. Some 45% of Tuscan families owned a PC in 2003, and only some 37% had Internet access; while this will have increased in the meantime, those are relatively low figures, then.

The Tuscan region pursued three actions to improve e-government, then – for public administration, for businesses, and for citizens; the latter was approached through a new regional law that also introduced the PAAS network …

Krems.
We’re entering the second and final day of the CeDEM 2011 conference here in Krems. The first speaker of this session is Bojan Cestnik, whose interest is in business process outsourcing and its connections to citizen participation. Bojan starts by noting that the availability and sophistication of user services provided by governments are steadily improving; there is also a strong EU policy stating that no citizen should be left behind by these services in 2010. At the same time, participation figures remain limited: only 28% of citizens participate (but 68% of companies). So, there’s a need to understand and …

Krems.
The final presenter on this first day at CeDEM 2011 is Rebecca Schild, whose interest is in engaging policy communities online, in Canada. Canada is at an important crossroads in public consultation at this point; there has been substantial consultation in the past using older media technologies, but since the 1990s there was a neoliberal shift towards a more exclusive policy process that became dominated by private sector interests. Can this be redressed using e-participation?

Does the Internet increase participation in policy processes, then, and for whom? Can this draw on the emerging networked public sphere, or does it …

Krems.
My own keynote was next at CeDEM 2011, and flowed on very nicely from Caroline’s presentation. Here are the slides, and the full paper – audio to follow soon also online now, as usual…

Krems.
The second round of keynotes at CeDEM 2011 starts with Caroline Haythornthwaite, whose focus is on making sense of online community structures. She begins from a social network analysis perspective, which understands social networks as constituted of relations between actors. Such social networks transcend online social networks, of course; rather, we now need to take a whole-of-system perspective in which social networking takes place across a range of networks, including online networks.

What’s especially important here, too, is a focus on new forms of collaborating and organising; with the shift towards Web 2.0, but also with many other concurrent …

Krems.
The final speaker in this CeDEM 2011 session is Kostas Zafiropoulos, whose interest is in political blogging in Greece. He describes Greek blogs as a self-organising community, and begins by showing the well-known image from Adamic & Glance’s study of the US political blogosphere around the 2004 election (which, analysing the patterns of interlinking between blogs, showed a highly polarised environment at the time).

Kostas’s project undertook a similar study for Greece. They began by using Technorati to find Greek political blogs (with “some” authority, according to Technorati’s measures), and tagged them according to their political orientation. During …

Krems.
The next speaker at CeDEM 2011 is Jakob Svensson, who shifts our attention towards the individual in political participation. He does this against the background of the 2010 Swedish elections, which for the first time used social media in a significant way. Jakob focussed on Nina Larsson, a politician of the conservative Liberal’s Party, who used two blogs during her campaign.

Jakob notes the different forms of rationalities (deliberative, but especially also expressive) which are on display in such uses; beyond this, there is also a more instrumental use of social media to influence election outcomes, of course (at …

Krems.
The next CeDEM 2011 session starts with a presentation by Peter Mambrey, whose focus is on the potential role of Twitter in e-participation. He begins by noting the expansion of the media ecology and the take-up of new media forms by specific groups in society; this creates new opportunities for political participation and self-empowerment, but also challenges for local administration and government.

There is a rising expectation of service quality, growing demands for local service delivery and expertise, competition between cities for citizens and enterprises, demographic change (with a marked population decline in some areas in Germany, for example) …