TED 06
Towards e-Democracy:
Participation, Deliberation, Communities
Mantova,
Italy
24 -
26 October, 2006
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In this talk I will examine some of the issues involved in developing
computing technology to support people in their activities. I will
provide some insights that have been gained from a variety of
research fields over the years, including human-computer interaction
(HCI), concerning the development of systems that people can actually
use, participatory design (PD), concerning approaches and methods for
inclusive and participatory design, and computer supported
cooperative work (CSCW), concerning the support of ensembles engaged
in coordinated activities. I will focus on how our perspectives on
the nature of organizations and people as rational decision-makers
or as sense-makers influence the kinds of support tools we develop,
using examples from group decision support systems (GDSS). The role
of representational media, and the importance of talk will be
highlighted.
|
Carlo Buzzi, Andrea Brighenti and Letizia Caporusso
|
The paper considers different types of spoiled ballots in
local administrative elections and focuses on the effects that the
introduction of electronic voting might produce. Drawing from
empirical results of a research project carried out in the Provincia
Autonoma di Trento, Italy, we show that both qualitative and
quantitative investigation point to an increase of void (blank)
ballots and to a decline of null (marked) ballots if the vote is cast
by means of a touchscreen.
The common goal defining online deliberation is simple: to use
computer mediated communication for serious, purposive dialogue. There
are many uses of networked communication today that meet this definition.
But a crucial form of deliberation - that which occurs when groups of
citizens collectively make decisions and plans - remains rare and
difficult online, rendering face-to-face deliberation necessary in many
contexts in which significant stakeholders are cut off by time or distance
from participating in decisions that affect them. The gap between the
present reality and the apparent potential of democratic online
deliberation is initially puzzling, because the tasks taken up in
face-to-face meetings can generally be mapped onto an online experience.
Online tools could provide alternative ways for citizens to participate
when attendance at a physical meeting is not an option, and the use of
such tools might in some instances lead to better, more careful
deliberation than occurs offline. Many people have had this vision,
dating back at least to the early days of the Internet. Why, then, has
online democratic decision making been so slow to develop? I will discuss
barriers that have thus far stood in the way of "e-democracy" and
outline a strategy for overcoming them.
|
Fiorella De Cindio, Antonio De Marco and Leonardo Sonnante
|
Community Networks have been pioneer experiences for supporting e-
participation in local communities. Although technologies are not the key
success factor, the availability of a dedicated software may help in
facilitating
people participation. The paper presents the first experience of use
of the prototype of a software for e-participation (called Deliberative
Community Networks) performed in the occasion of the municipal elections
held in Milan in Spring 2006.
|
Roman Efremov, Alexander Lotov and David Rios Insua
|
There is a growing interest in promoting participation of lay
stakeholders in
public decision making processes, possibly with the aid of
Internet based systems.
This implies supporting non-sophisticated users and, consequently,
developing user-friendly, yet rigorous, participatory group decision
support methods. We outline a
framework to develop such methods based on interactive Pareto
frontier visualization combined with expression of preferences in
terms of goals and using goal-based arbitration.
The TED project is drawing to a close: four years of debate and discussion
of how decision analytic ideas can help shape deliberative e-democracy and
e-participation processes. What has the project achieved? What questions
has it raised and what ones has it answered?
In this paper I shall look back on many of the activities that have been
supported by TED, not to catalogue them but so that they may serve as
milestones along the way to developing e-democracy. In doing so I shall
raise a number of questions that suggest to me, at least, that we are only
at the beginning of a very long road. We may have the technology and the
analytical tools to involve the citizen in societal decision making over
the web, but I wonder whether we humans have evolved individually,
culturally and as societies to do so in an effective, transparent and valid
manner.
|
Carlos Grima and Jose A. Rubio
|
In this paper, we shall describe a number of issues concerning the use
of ICT in politics, government, public administration, and public
policy decision making at all levels (strategic, tactical and
operational) suggesting a general architecture to support
e-government. It will imply the use of negotiation algorithms,
e-voting, computer security to transmit specially sensitive
information (as the citizens’ political preferences), digital
identification or signatures,.. Many of these ideas have been
developed in the last few years, and the corresponding technologies
are mature enough to be integrated in a global system that supports
e-government. The system we aim at would support all public
administrations in a given country, in line with various attempts at
various countries in the EU. Such a big system would require a
careful review of several architectural concepts and the development
of new design patterns.
We shall start by describing some use cases and the role of the involved
actors, including citizens, civil servants, private organisations,
political parties and software agents endowed with a certain
intelligence.
We
shall, then, describe the general architecture. For that purpose, we
shall divide the system in three main subsystems, we shall specify
the main databases and will provide the interrelations. We shall
provide the common features of the subsystems, their objectives and
the various dependencies.
The
first subsystem is that one in charge of interfacing with the
involved actors. It will promote user-friendly and efficient
communications with and between actors. We shall propose an intuitive
graphical metaphore accessible to non-sophisticated users. We shall
also describe how citizens may save time by delegating participation
tasks to a software agent capable of learning the political ideology
of its owner.
Another
important subsystem is that regulating and managing administrative
procedures, which consist of any interaction between a citizen, a
civil servant, a political organization or party (or their
representing software agents) and the government. Therefore, we also
include procedures leading to a political decision. Among many
others, we include paying taxes, asking for public financial support,
voting in an election,… The subsystem will interpret the
administrative procedures demanded, described in a standard format,
to transform them in individual actions to be sent to the involved
civil servants and governmental agencies.
The
final main subsystem, represents the set of computerised governmental
agencies (a townhall, a university, the Foreign Office,…). It
is our core system, as all actions involved in administrative
procedures will be addressed to it, submitted to the proper agency,
which will return the actions referring to the administrative
procedures.
Several
governmental agencies will be specially relevant for the proper
functioning of eGovernment. One of them is that in charge of
coordinating political decision making, managing debates,
negotiations, votes,… Depending on the involved decision, all
citizens and/or all politicians, would be entitled to take part in.
We shall pay special attention to the internal decomposition of this
system to support public decision making.
Once
the subsystems have been described, together with their internal
decomposition and their interrelations, we shall face their dynamic
behaviour, through some representative cases.
We
shall finally speculate on how the transition from the current
political system, with little ICT involved, to our proposed system
might take place, taking into account the various financial,
psychological and social barriers to be faced, to ensure sufficient
success.
In 2002 the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano in collaboration with the
University of Bozen-Bolzano started the eBZ initiative with the
overall objective to foster the use of information technology in the
local administration. Since that time a number of concrete projects
and events have been activated that brought Bolzano closer towards
this new form of public administration, also known as e-government,
e-democracy, e-voting, etc. The presentation starts with an overview
about the most important eBZ activities in the past. Most
prominently, the international TED Conference on E-Government
(TCGOV-2005) has been organized in Bozen-Bolzano from March 2-4, 2005.
We will discuss the lessons learned and the impact of such activities
on the e-government strategies of the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano.
It turns out that know-how and innovation are key aspects for a
successful transition towards e-government.
|
Raimo Hamalainen, Jyri Mustajoki and Mika Marttunen
|
The proliferation of the World Wide Web has opened new opportunities to support
participatory decision making. We now also have a number of Web-based tools to support participation
and decision analytical methods. This opportunity is of special interest in environmental applications
where we always have multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders who are often geographically in
different locations. In spite of the attractiveness of the tools, we still have very limited number of users. In
this paper, we discuss the ways and requirements to apply decision analytical tools in Web-based public
participation. We demonstrate a framework to support participatory processes, which includes Web-based
tools for decision analysis and participatory feedback. The applicability of the framework is discussed in
terms of experiences obtained from three lake regulation applications in Finland. Our main message is
that there has to be a strong commitment to create a culture of Web-based participation by case projects
before the public stakeholders and the authorities can accept this new approach.
|
Manuel Villoria and Angel Iglesias
|
Civic participation at the local level has the capacity to strengthen
democratic institutions, improve public service delivery and use, inform
governance strategies, increase social capital, and legitimize local
governments. Declines in social capital and civic participation over the past
twenty years, as discussed by Putnam (1995) and Ramarkrishnan and Baldassare
(2004), reduce the ability of local governments to govern effectively and
provide the best services to their constituents, particularly among these
governments' socially and economically disadvantaged residents. Without
citizen input, local governments have trouble responding effectively to
community concerns (Putnam, et al, 1994). The legitimacy of the city [rests]
"in the form of government and the story it promise[s] - non-political,
efficient, and responsive government" that both facilitates community
involvement and delivers needed and desired services (Nalbandian, 1999:194).
This trend toward decreased civic participation overall, such as low voter
turnout, has been countered recently by significant increases in civic
participation on the local level in many cities. These new forms and increased
incidence of participation provide both cities and their residents an
opportunity to reap the many potential benefits of increased citizen
engagement.
Our rapidly changing and increasingly diverse world calls for improvements to
the traditional form of representative democracy through civic participation
strategies (Iglesias and Garcia, 2005). The process of globalization requires
local governments to become active innovators in civic participation in an
effort to redeem and legitimatize governance through democratic processes
(Hise, et al, 1996). A 1993 Brookings Institution study by Tufts University
professors argued that civic participation is "redemptive in three crucial
ways. First, participation nourishes the democratic spirit of individuals.
Second, it builds community, which in turn nurtures shared values such as
compassion, tolerance, and equality. Third, and most broadly, participation
transforms institutions so that they become more effective instruments of
democracy" (Berry, et al, 1993:5).
By giving citizens access to additional tools and processes with which to
advocate for their neighborhoods, effectively decentralizing local governance,
cities have the opportunity to improve trust and governance (Harrigan, 1992).
Chaskin and Garg (1997) argue that support for "neighborhood-based governance"
comes from two complimentary beliefs - first, a belief in true democratic
processes, and second, a belief that decentralized approaches to government are
more responsive to citizens' needs (Chaskin and Abunimah, 1999:60). Thus,
civic participation serves to enhance both functions of local governance, which
are sometimes at odds with each other - democratic legitimacy and service
delivery - and improve both democratic and managerial outcomes.
In light of the many potential benefits of increased civic participation,
various local governments in the United States and European nations have
recently passed and implemented policies to aid in the creation of alternate
forms of participation, to increase participation, and ultimately to improve
local governance outcomes (Iglesias and Garcia, 2005). The central challenge
of the near future is to evaluate these policies to determine whether they have
generated significant improvements in civic participation and the governance
outcomes discussed above.
As civic participation both legitimizes and improves governance, it is an
essential component to local governance. Local governments have recently
viewed citizens as active participants rather than passive consumers in the
community decision-making process. Further, many seek to utilize citizen
participation to improve municipal decision-making. The process of stimulating
and maintaining civic engagement is ongoing, as the system strives to achieve
the many potential benefits of increased participation at the local level,
including enhanced democratic legitimacy and social capital, and improved
governance outcomes.
The impact Participative Budgets are having on city governance is progressive
and substantive, although there are many areas that need considerable
improvement. While in Spain there are several experiences that show that the
system has increased participation among many stakeholders, it has not reached
out to all of the residents, and many experiences lack representative
diversity. The system also lacks strong administrative and deliberative
capacity, which is vital to the system's effectiveness. Many intermediate
outcomes have been positive, however. On the local level, Participative
Budgets have affected local issues. On the citywide level, the participants
have made recommendations to the authorities on issues regarding land use and
transportation, and revisions to community plans, resulting in improved service
delivery and city policies.
The central challenges for the cities that have implemented these experiences
now are to maintain this process of civic renewal and find new ways to improve
its effectiveness, through improved outreach to under-represented residents,
increased deliberative capacity, and the formation of additional social
networks through which a process of Participative Budget can attain greater
social and political influence. All of this will be discussed in our paper.
e-Democracy is considered an integral part of the European e-Government
policy. It is furthermore a vital tool in making governments more
relevant to citizens by increasing their participation and involvement in
decision-making and helping to face the large-scale disaffection with existing
democratic processes. In fact, 65% of respondents to the Commission's latest
public consultation on eGovernment said that eDemocracy can help reduce
Europe's democratic deficit. However, excluding the research and development
that is being carried out under respective EU programmes, no
explicit e-Democracy policy has yet been formulated at the EU level.
The proposed paper seeks to examine current and future EU plans for
the formulation of such a policy, focusing on eParticipation, as one of the
three key components of Europe's approach to eDemocracy (i.e.
eParticipation, eLegislation and eVote).
|
Miroslav Karny and Tatiana V. Guy
|
E-democracy has many facets addressed by respective experts. It seems,
however, that implications of probabilistic theory of decision making
(DM) and especially of information theory are underestimated in this area.
The paper contributes to filling this gap by: (i) providing methodology
of fully probabilistic design of decision strategies that, among others,
allows efficient handling of multi-criterion problems; (ii) pointing to
consequences of limiting perceiving and processing capacity of DM
participants.
Participatory policy decision making involves people from different
backgrounds, skills and cultures which makes models and tools
built for one community and social setting unusable in other
communities. The design and implementation of software capable
of supporting public participation in decision-making, needs
to address the economic, cultural, and educational characteristics
of their users. If we want to facilitate and support participatory
decision processes using electronic negotiation support systems,
we need to provide a flexible and highly customizable software
environment capable of generating software platforms which can be
easily tailored to the abilities and needs of their users, the
contexts, and tasks the users have to undertake. This talk gives
an overview of our experiences in the design and implementation
of e-negotiation systems, in particular the Invite software
platform, and the impact these systems may
have on solving complex multi-attribute problems.
Using technology for election processes has been an issue since the
end of the 19th century. Not surprisingly the discussion of
nation-wide instant electronic decision making was part of many
visions of the future. Today electronic voting includes not only
includes e-voting machines or remote Internet voting applications
but appears in numerous forms around the world. After a lot of
trials we have seen first real world legally binding uses of this
new form of casting votes. This talk will give a report on the
two ESF TED e-voting workshops held in 2004 and 2006 at Lake
Constance in Austria and discuss the experiences collected so far
as well as try to give an outlook on future developments.
|
Alberto Marini, Marco Padula and Amanda Reggiori
|
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based free content encyclopedia
project; it is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most
articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website.
Wikipedia is the most successful among the web based free content
projects. Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has steadily risen in
size and popularity. Currently Wikipedia has more than 5.3 million
articles in many languages, 1,415,000 in the huge English-language
version.
There are 229 language editions of Wikipedia, 17 of which have more
than 50,000 articles. In many languages the corresponding version of
Wikipedia is the larger encyclopedia. Wikipedia ranks among the top 20
most visited sites.
MediaWiki, its collaborative open source software platform, is robust,
efficient, flexible and effective.
Wikipedia stimulated the development of many other collaborative
"wiki projects" for a large range of environments and objectives.
Wikipedia and wiki sites can be considered as concrete results of
cooperative work in virtual communities. In facts, wiki projects
involve yet hundreds of thousands of contributors.
For many reasons wiki projects can be proposed and exploited for
e-democracy objectives and in global multicultural environments..
A local wiki project it's sustainable by any community, even not
skilled (it's not difficult to be supported by skilled contributors,
possibly helping from a remote station).
It's easy to access wiki contents, select them and personalize them for a free "local community reuse".
It's easy and therefore appealing to insert new contributions concerning specific? problems.
A local wiki project can benefit from links to a wikipedia version
or to other wiki projects in the same or in a different language.
A wiki project has many advantages in supporting international long
distance actions, in particular for educational and solidarity aims.
Direct democracy refers to a vote by the electorate (not just
representatives) on a specific issue, for example on devolution. Most
examples of direct democracy use a straightforward vote: for or
against a proposal.
When the range of choices is much greater, such as allocation of funds
between several contending projects, then the task of translating
voters choices and preferences into a collective decision becomes more
complex.
For a choice of ten candidates, it may be reasonable to ask voters to
rank them in order of preference. However if there are hundreds of
options, it would not be practical to expect voters to give every
option a rank or score. Reasoning from partial information of the
wishes of voters either individually or collectively may be required.
This paper seeks to explore the potential value and limitations of
direct democracy using ICT, what types of decision would be more
amenable to direct democracy and what algorithms would be appropriate
to arrive at a decision. The use of ICT means that we can use more
complex algorithms which are not subject to practical restrictions
imposed by manual counting. This is particularly important where there
the decision to be made is complex.
The use of techniques drawn from diverse disciplines such as
Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence are explored. Such
techniques may be applicable in two ways. Firstly to determine an
individuals criteria or schedule of preferences from limited
information and secondly to determine the collective decision which is
optimal according to some criteria. In either case an iterative
question-and-answer process may be appropriate.
|
Jose Manuel Vera and Jesus Messía
|
As mentioned in the companion papers in this session, there is a
growing interest about participatory budgets, all over the world and,
specially, in Spain. They are viewed as opportunities to further
involve citizens, reduce the democratic deficit and, even, improve
public-policy decision making.
Although all grounded on similar, and relatively simple, principles,
their comparison reveal many differences in various experiences, in
issues like the budget percentage to be elaborated, the number of
participants, the number of rounds, However, far from amorphous and
disorganised, they are structured around a set of rules which
described the necessary bodies, mechanisms and principles, contained
in a handbooks addressed to the citizens, quite clearly formulated.
Recently, there have been several attempts to introduce ICT within
participatory budget elaboration, as in other aspects of politics and
public policy decision making, as most participatory budget
experiences have been based on physical meetings and voting by hands,
with little ICT involved.
In the paper, we shall review the legal framework that supports
participatory budget experiences, as currently ran in Spain, and
elaborate a framework to support e-participatory budgets, with
emphasis on the Rios and Rios Insua (2006) model. Relevant data
protection issues shall be discussed.
|
Jose Maria Moreno-Jimenez, Juan Aguaron, Maria Teresa Escobar and
Alberto Turon
|
E-cognocracy (Moreno-Jiménez, 2003a; Moreno-Jiménez and Polasek, 2003)
is a new representative
model that, combining the two most extended democratic systems, the
representative or liberal and the
participative or direct, is oriented to the extraction and diffusion
of knowledge derived from the scientific
resolution of public decision making problems related to the
governance of society. This paper
summarises the philosophical, methodological and technological
foundations of this democratic model
and highlights its cognitive characteristics.
|
Jyri Mustajoki and Raimo P. Hamalainen |
Web-HIPRE is a decision analytical software available on the
Web. The software was introduced in 1998 and since then it has been
applied in several real life applications and decision analytical
courses. In this paper, we describe the history of Web-HIRPE and
analyze user statistics and the results of the recent user survey. We
also describe two applications in lake regulation management as well
as in nuclear emergency management. Web-HIPRE is a part of the
Decisionarium Web site for global decision support.
By what values should we evaluate e-participation? What makes it 'better'?
In this theory-building workshop, we will explore ways of evaluating
e-participation, and the values by which we judge democratic
participation in policy and decision-making. How can we judge best
practice, if we do not agree on what is 'better'? Can we reconcile the
values and techniques of different disciplines or research approaches?
To help us explore these issues, we will be using a group support
system, WebIQ (www.webiq.net).
With it we can quickly brainstorm ideas,
collecting dozens in five minutes, organise them and rate them: leaving
us more time for deliberation on the issues identified.
Participants will be divided into two groups (Group 1 and Group 2) and
each group will have access to 14 computers (maximum number
of available licences) to use WebIQ in a 90 minutes session in a
computer laboratory (Tuesday late morning or Wednesday early
afternoon). Both groups will meet together on Thursday late morning
in the conference room and use of personal laptops (up to 14) is
possible.
|
Giovanna Parmigiani and Umberto Emiliani
|
Pa.ì.S. is the e-democracy project through which the Province
of Parma has experimented evolutionary strategies to enhance the
citizenship's active participation in the policy making process
thanks to friendly, well-known and usable technology enabling
a large number of people to join the discussion and participate
in the final decision at any time and from any place. The project
has been approved and co-financed by the Ministry of
Innovation and the CNIPA (National Centre for the Innovation in
the Public Administration), started in October 2005 and has
come to an end on October 20th 2006 (e-vote session).
The e-vote is the final step of Action 3: LAB (e-participation
Laboratories: from the web-supported discussion and collaboration
between citizens and local public administration to the final
deliberation). The e-vote system and application, developed by
the technological partner LTT, is aimed at providing voters
the opportunity to cast their ballots at any time from any
place via the Internet, from a computer at any-one of
county-controlled polling places in a county; the computer
must not necessarily be owned and operated by election personnel;
it is recognised by IP address or VPN. Authentication of the
voters is guaranteed through username and password, an
anti-physhing device is also provided.
Ballot integrity and secrecy are protected through the use of
encryption technology (RSA): a Notary's digital certificate is
used to encrypt all ballots, the Notary's Smart Card is required
at the end in order to decrypt ballots and count votes.
Encrypted ballots are saved in a random order and cannot be
matched to voters. They are also stored in a backup repository
held by a third-party organization, in order to allow cross-match,
thus ensuring that malicious data manipulation would be discovered.
The talk will include the live simulation of an eVote session.
|
Wolfgang Polasek and Jose Maria Moreno-Jimenez
|
The new European society will be based on common economic and
political principles, but the existence of such a society need to be
robust from different cultural approaches and polyvalent political
views. Next to language, history and religion, language (skills) is
the most important obstacle to such a new European society. Next to
the 4 principles of the EU, i.e. free movements of goods, services,
workers and capital, we have a new tool for monitoring these basic
principles, the internet. This allows the development of new tools in
the process European e-government, briefly called e&u-government. The
main principles of e&u-government are easy proclaimed, but difficult
to be implemented: equal accession of information, political
transparency for decision making and solidarity of citizens in the
implementation.
Such desiderata are only achieved by a mutual cultural understanding
and tolerance which needs to be constantly monitored and openly
practiced over the internet.
This new concepts needs the political willingness of all the decision
makers on a national, regional and local level. This was first
advocated in an approach called e-cognocracy by Moreno-Jimenez
and Polasek
(2005). Now we extend this approach to a concept of e-citizenship
which needs to be implemented in the EU and which guarantees political
and cultural rights of all EU citizens, independently where they are
born, work and live.
The paper develops this new perspective of me&u-Integration in the EU
which is based on the new internet-society. Thus, politicians have the
right and the duty to provide heir citizens at all times constant
information and basic 4 European citizen rights, i.e. e-democracy,
e-citizenship, e-education and e-communication at all levels in all
member states.
|
Andreas Kuehn, Reinhard Riedl and Wolfgang Polasek
|
E-Government in the narrow sense means internet-based interaction between
citizens/companies and public administration. We consider e-government
in a broader sense as the implementation of an optimal IT infrastructure
for the state, which optimizes \223production\224 in the public sector.
The key three R&D
challenges for this broader context are digital identity management, resource
integration in legislation and in administration, and knowledge management. The
development of holistic solutions for these three areas has to deal
with five dimensions of complexity: contradictory stakeholder requirements,
incompatible multidisciplinary requirements, system heterogeneity
throughout Europe within
all disciplinary views, the generic multitude of IT tasks and the hardness of
IT alignment challenges, and the need to handle change through supported and
enforced learning curves. There is basic research needed both with respect to
solution blueprints and with respect to implementation methods, which
comprise planning, design, software implementation, organizational
implementation, and
evaluation.
The key research question is: How can we handle the five
dimensions of complexity with dedicated implementation management instruments?
Unfortunately, neither in basic research nor in R&D, an
interface-based
collaboration between teams with different knowledge backgrounds works
unless
there is a long history of collaboration among the participating
teams.
However, grey-zones instead of crystal-clear interfaces may lead to
successful
collaboration. Therefore, we need new collaboration management
instruments for
teams with differing knowledge backgrounds. They have to address the
problem of
transdisciplinary collaboration, but additionally they have to support
stakeholder management, system interoperability, IT internal
alignment, and
fast and sustainable learning curves. Putting it differently, we have
to frame
the grey-zones between the disciplines in such a way that they can be
monitored
and managed.
Boundary provide such a framing method. In this presentation we first
explain
the challenges for e-government projects and their management. In
particular we
sketch the problems of transdisciplinary solution development for
digital
identity management and for resource integration. Then we discuss the
requirements for boundary objects and analyze the properties of
several types
of classical boundary objects, such as robots in AI, real-world
scenarios in
applied computer science, visual prototypes in IT customer management,
and
several different types of IT architecture modeling concepts. This is
used to
motivate and draw up a life-cycle management concepts for boundary
objects
within projects as well as for boundary objects within project
families. Both
concepts explicitly address the knowledge management issues. Finally,
we
validate these concepts against the requirements and we derive open
research
questions for boundary object management in e-government.
The talk will review the experience of TED over the past 4 years.
|
Jesus Rios Aliaga and David Rios Insua
|
As mentioned in the companion papers in this session, there is a
growing interest about participatory budgets all over the world and,
specially, in Spain. They are viewed as opportunities to further
involve citizens, reduce the democratic deficit and, even, improve
public-policy decision making.
Interestingly enough, in spite of various attempts to introduce ICT
within politics and public policy decision making, most participatory
budget experiences have been based on physical meetings and voting by
hands, with little ICT and analytical decision support involved.
In the paper, we provide a framework to support participatory budget
elaboration and a system architecture to implement such through the
web. The framework essentially goes through the following steps:
The corresponding architecture includes e-voting and e-negotiation
modules. Experiences with the architecture are described as well.
|
Paulo Rosa, Goncalo Lobo and Angela Guimaraes Pereira
|
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasingly
becoming more
pervasive of peoples lives, both for individual and collective usage.
Hence, it
becomes tempting to develop quality tools that can be used in the
context of societal
debates on public policies.
The e2FocusGroup (http://alba.jrc.it/eFG/) is an Internet platform
that enables a
small group of people to have a focused discussion about a pre-defined
issue. Each
group has at least one Moderator and several Participants (ideally not
more than
twelve as in many social research group settings, such as focus
groups, etc.). They
meet in a virtual room that offers the means for an on-line debate
like a Discussion
Chat, a Collaborative Whiteboard and a Virtual Library.
In this contribution we report how the e2FocusGroup platform is being
successfully
used in some venues, although we are looking at ways to improve its
deployment,
including extending its functionalities to better serve the purpose of
extending public
policy debates.
|
Carlos Grima and Jose A. Rubio
|
A virtual community is a set of persons with
common objectives and interests which interact exclusively through a
computer network, generally Internet. This interaction is relatively
continuous in time, following certain pre-established rules. The
tools used for interaction include web pages, mailing lists,
discussion fora, chats, news services, videoconferences,…
which allow exchanges of ideas, information, opinions, files,
relevant links,…
The virtuality of these communities entail that
(physical) distances between members are irrelevant. Therefore, given
the presence of Internet, people that, otherwise, would not have
interacted, can make it wherever they are located. Consequently,
these communities are achieving a considerable political influence,
from the local to the international level.
In the end, these communities are composed of
persons, with similar requirements, except those referring to the
physical space management. Therefore, they need some kind of
government, and, even, some kind of economy, possibly only relevant
in a virtual world. Therefore, in these virtual communities the
concepts of e-Government and e-Democracy achieve their full meaning
and may be directly applied.
As far as government is concerned, virtual
communities are usually administered bi its founder, which tends to
be the owner of the community. This administration is undertaken at
his own criterion, as he will have the power to admit and excude
members, and even the power to eliminate the entire community.
However, it is possible to undertake a more
democratic administration when the community gets big enough. This
usually implies elaborating a constitution, elaborating laws based on
the constitution, and the existence of several positions periodically
elected in a democratic fashion. There is no owner, neither a founder
administering at his will, but a virtual democratic community.
In every virtual community, there are several
permits that affect each action. These include: publish a message,
read a message, create a subgroup, exclude a member,… Each
member of the community will have his own collection of permits,
defining its role in the community. For example, a standard member
of the community would have the role of participant with permits such
as publish a message and read a message; an
administrator, on top of the role of participant, could have, as
well, the role of moderator, therefore having permits such as
excluding a memberand admitting a new member.
Typically, the owner of the virtual community will create and
manage the roles, their permits and will provide roles to persons.
In this paper we shall adapt the system of roles
to a democratic virtual community in which there is no master and,
therefore, roles must be democratically managed and provided.
The first issue is that no role has sufficient
power to eliminate the rest of roles and, consequently, attain
absolute power over the community. Typically, in a computer system
there is a superuser or administrator which has absolute power. In a
nondemocratic virtual community, the founder will typically have all
the permits within a role called, say, owner. In a democratic
community this is no longer admissible, and we shall discuss possible
solutions to this problem. In this sense, it would be desirable that
certain roles would be assigned automatically to certain person
democratically elected, and according to the laws. We, therefore,
need to device appropriate computer structures to support such
automatic assignment. We shall discuss the entailed problems and
provide the corresponding solutions.
A second objective is to distribute role
management and assignment between members. Once again, in a standard
system or a nondemocratic virtual community the administrator or
owner will be the only one enabled to do it. However, in a democracy
as powers are separated, each one should be able to manage its own
subroles and assign them according to the laws and their own
criteria. We shall explore all possibilities, emerging problems and
proposed solutions.
A third objective will be to ensure that the set
of roles and relations among them should be changed at any time, as
we should not expect a same structure for any virtual democratic
community. In fact, the role structure will depend heavily on the
cosen laws. However, we shall propose a generic role structure that
might be valid for most existing virtual democratic communities.
Finally, we shall discuss the application of all
these concepts on an eDemocracy belonging to a nonvirtual society.
The most interesting issue, in this case, would be its applicability
to create debate groups among citizens, enabling a truly open,
truthful and democratic debate.
|
Alexandros Xenakis, Evika Karamagioli and Vasilis Koulolias
|
The eRepresentative research project aims to investigate the potential
impact of a virtual elected representatives desktop to support the
work of elected representatives at national, regional and local level.
Such an eRepresentative would allow personalised interaction with, and
integration of, relevant information for elected representatives to
support their day-to-day committee work anytime, anywhere. The
eRepresentative research project explores the extent to which a novel
combination of information management, mobile technologies and
security systems can be designed to enable information sharing and
deliberation among elected representatives through a mobile,
personalised working environment which would allow them to participate
in committee events from a geographically distributed environment.
|
Nan Zhang, Simon French, Colum Dain, Clare Bayley and Angela
Cassidy
|
The handling of food safety related issues by the UK authorities has
often been found wanting, particularly in relation to wider impact on
rural communities and environments: e.g. BSE, E. coli, salmonella
contaminations and the foot and mouth outbreak. Such issues are often
unstructured where the impacts of the crises were much more diverse
and far-reaching than first considered. The solving of such problems
asks for an integrated approach which takes account of political,
economical, social and environmental perspectives of the situation.
Literature suggests that one of the difficulties to solve complex
decision problems lie in the communication gaps between decision
makers, stakeholders and analysts. When a group of decision makers
aware that they have a decision problem to solve, they will ask an
analyst, or several, to work with experts in various areas and the
stakeholders in order to gather information, incorporate such
information in the analysis and inform decision makers and guide them
towards a decision(French and Papamichail, 2004; French et al.,
2005).It is essential to incorporate all aspects of interests between
different parties who contribute to the decision making process in
order to reach a balanced and sustainable decision. By involving local
people in local decisions may provide additional information,
therefore strengthening the decision-making process and resulting in
better management of the situation. Other benefits of participation
might include the resolution of conflict, trust building between the
stakeholder and decision-making authorities, better public awareness
and understanding of risks, and more acceptable outcomes to
stakeholders(French et al., 2005). Mental model theory is believed to
be an effective way to analyse such difficulties on a fundamental
cognitive level. A mental model is the cognitive representation of the
external environment in the human mind. Due to the cognitive
limitations, people make mental models that are incomplete,
inaccurate, imprecisely stated and changing with time. People also
differ in the way they prefer to gather, process and evaluate
information due to their differences in background, personality,
experience, etc(Bayley and French, 2005). Mental processes can be
further understood at the group level of analysis. The construction of
knowledge within different paradigm groups leads to different
interpretation of the problem situation as well. Analysing mental
models of different stakeholders groups can aid knowledge comparison
and integration between disciplines, stimulate information transfer
and communication and therefore shed light on the decision problems.
Mapping techniques can be used to elicit mental models helping
visualise knowledge(Norman, 1983; Senge, 1990).