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Contents 1 Introduction Rona Zevin 2 Introduction Jill Sanders 3 Introduction Amy Cooper 4 Introduction 3 5 Introduction 4 6 Introduction Hans Hagedorn 7 Introduction 6 8 Introduction 7 9 Introduction 8 10 Introduction 9 11 Introduction 10 12 Introduction 11 13 Introduction 12 14 Introduction 13 15 Introduction 14 16 Introduction 15 17 Introduction 16 18 Introduction 17 19 Introduction 18 20 Introduction 19 21 Introduction Alle van Meeteren 22 Introduction 21 23 Introduction 22 24 Introduction 23 25 Introduction 24 26 Introduction Babarinsa Oladapo 27 Introduction 26 28 Introduction 27 29 Introduction 28 30 Introduction Norman Greenfield 31 Introduction 30 32 Introduction Steven Clift 33 Introduction 32 34 Introduction Peter Davison 35 Introduction 34 36 Introduction 35 37 Introduction Chan-Gon Kim 38 Craig Hubley 39 Jordi Barrat i Esteve 40 Introduction empty 39 41 Introduction empty 40 42 Introduction empty 41 43 Introduction empty 42 44 Introduction empty 43 45 Introduction empty 44 46 Introduction empty 45 47 Introduction empty 46 48 Introduction empty 47 49 Introduction empty 48 50 Introduction empty 49

Introduction Rona Zevin

Rona is the director of the Office of Electronic Communications for the City of Seattle, Washington USA. She manages the City's website, government access TV channel, and programs to address the digital divide. Seattle has created a "Democracy Portal," using the Seattle Channel TV and its website www.seattlechannel.org For more information about the Seattle Democracy Portal, you can check www.seattle.gov/html/citizen/edemocracy.htm

Introduction Jill Sanders

Jill has been involved with the community websites in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. These were created in 1997 by local people and they now comprise a family of ten community websites for each of the borough's towns and villages. These websites feature a collection of websites for local organisations, charities, and other community groups, plus our MPs, local, regional and national government, all the search engines, online newspapers, reference resources, etc.

The websites also feature a local news Journal, frequently updated, giving information on matters of local importance, controversial issues, events, etc., important to our communities. The Journal also has the advantage of making access to information easy and enjoyable through the news articles where they link to relevant documentation - consultations, reports, etc. . They feature plenty of photography.

Additionally they "specialise" in their local elections and you will see in the right column of the Journal links to several projects designed to inform voters, introduce and familiarise candidates to their electorate, and increase turnout. This is a lot of hard work. It is all a lot of hard work.

Online Communities has made hundreds of websites for local organisations, and some have had an important impact on local policy and decision-making. Check out FORCE and Mogden on Twickenham Online, check out the police community support groups.

They also have letters to the editor (left frame) which is a VoxPop - the participant enjoys these. They have now developed a content management system for our users to update their own websites and webpages. See the Ward Pages for the councillors' community pages (most ignored and unused) and the local police pages.

In short, this is an online community! Just as you get if you get to know a town town, knock on doors, meet people, talk together, etc. Unfortunately it is little recognised by our local authority - indeed, it is eschewed by our local authority and this is a mystery to us and to our users too. This is, however, damaging to the community websites and to our communities, not to mention our local authority. It diminishes and disrupts us all. They are about democracy, not politics, but there are those who seem to find it difficult to differentiate between them. see linking politics and public www.oncom.org.uk

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Gap between government and public

I (AvM) am focused on Usenet. From that point of view, I noticed that participant 1 signals a gap between the government and the online communities. I think it is a fundamental task to link the authorities with the digital public. In my opinion the authorities has to step down to the public, instead of trying to lift the public to themselves.

Introduction Amy Cooper

Amy is a PhD candidate from the Univeristy of Queensland, Australia. Her interest in the e-democracy best practices project stems from an undergradute double major in Political Science, and a current PhD thesis on the Internet's effect on democracy. Amy's research investigates the practice and theory of e-democracy in the Australian, UK and US political systems.

The Queensland State Government's established e-democracy policy and procedures provide a vibrant example of e-democracy in her local region. If you'd like a look yourselves, visit the following URLs:

E-democracy Unit: http://www.communities.qld.gov.au/community/edemocracy.html

E-Petitions: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/EPetitions_QLD/HTML/

Parliament Webcast: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Broadcast/

Online community consultation: http://www.getinvolved.qld.gov.au/

Online youth community consultation: http://www.generate.qld.gov.au/

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Introduction 3

The participant is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Democracy and Interactive Media Environments at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and a Fellow of the Department of Learning and Educational Development at the University of Melbourne.

He is researching a number of areas falling under the general rubric of e-democracy, including:

• E-government, digital democracy and online citizen participation in Australia, with comparison to current international practice.
• The digital divide, civil society and the development of literacies for effective democratic citizenship and social inclusion.
• Assessing the online performance of Australian political party websites.
• The Smart Communities Research Project, in which he and a team of researchers are investigating issues of information sharing and governance by looking at how schools, government agencies, NGOs and other community (The Smart Communities Project Website is at

http://smartcommunities.scam.ecu.edu.au/index.htmlnetworks attempt to support 'at risk' children and young people.)

• Issues of information sharing and governance in Australian civil society.
• Developing applications of single source digital publishing using XML to online policy consultation.
• Convergent technologies, such as interactive television, using the interactive media laboratory at Murdoch University.

During the last few months, he has presented some of my findings at conferences and colloquia in Canada, Brazil, Italy and throughout Australia.

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Introduction 4

The participant works currently works for a Community Based Enterprise (CBE) in Blackburn in the UK. They recently just finished a Wired Up Communities project which was funded by the Government with an intent to bridge the digital divide. eDemocracy was an implicit aspiration in all of this but, for the UK, The participant thinks eDemocracy is seen a panacea to the current lack of democratic participation. He thinks some of the issues that face the UK are uniquely British and require different and radical thinking.

The participant is of the opinion that democracy and democratic participation in both the UK and, in a wider context, is rapidly becoming irrelevant because it finds itself besieged by two complementary forces, on one hand the EU is slowly eroding both the sovereignty and autonomous scope of the Nation State, whilst on the other, Globalism requires and imposes standardisation which further reduce the options for national governments.

In the UK, these problems are compounded by an historical disconnection to and with democracy. The unusual constitutional arrangement has enforced the notion that governance is best left to Government with no let from the wider electorate other than the chance to vote every 5 years in an electoral system that distorts the desires and aspirations of the electorate.

The participant feels that it is axiomatic that for democracy to flourish, it has to be a process in which all participants feel engaged and relevant and it is against this backdrop that his interest in eDemocracy is framed. (see Linking politics and public

There are some interesting developments here in the UK happening in schools notably the twin notions of pupil voice and citizenship. It may well be that the opportunity for school children to "discover" democracy can be facilitated by these notions. The participant is also of the opinion that popular culture has a supporting role to play via television voting programmes such as "Pop Idol". If we ignore the content for a moment and look at the mechanics, then he thinks they play a valuable part in letting children understand the concept and consequence of voting and the power of the increment.

The participant is currently undertaking a (PT) Msc. in eGovernance at the University of Salford.

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Participants in democracy need to feel engaged and relevant I (AvM) understrike the remark: 'that it is axiomatic that for democracy to flourish, it has to be a process in which all participants feel engaged and relevant'. Internet, specially Usenet,gives an opportunity. People are engaged there, because they like to communicate. But, to make it also relevant the democratic system has to connect the government with the Internet-community, in which the community is leading.

Introduction Hans Hagedorn

Hans works for Zebralog.

Zebralog offers every service that is needed to run online dialogues: institutional embedding, marketing, technical backbone and moderation. Its members have a strong background in participatory planning processes, social science and face-to-face moderation. In Germany, they were among the first to conduct online consultations for various state bodies, among them the government of Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and other smaller cities.

His hope for this research project is, that we will be able to collect a comprehensive set of best practises also from non-english speaking contries.

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Introduction 6

Participant has been steeped in e-participation for the last five years as one of the founding directors of Dialogue by Design. The DbyD story sprang out of a meeting he facilitated with a colleague for the World Bank in Washington back in the late 90s. They were then freelance facilitators working mainly on environmental, sustainable development and human rights issues, and had been instrumental in establishing programmes like The Environment Council's Resolve project - using third parties to mediate and facilitate in contentious environmental situations such as the Brent Spar, GMOs and many others.

The meeting in Washington was a watershed because they were struck by the cost and impact of flying people from all around the world for a one-day meeting. When they got home they explored how the meeting could have been run electronically, but decided forums and chatrooms and bulletin boards did not provide the kind of structure required for having serious discussion of complex issues.

They were then fortunate to team up with a computer genius, and over about a year collaborated to produce a set of electronic templates that emulate common facilitation methods such as issue identification, prioritisation, brainstorming etc; they also came up with a way to allow large numbers of people to work together to review or develop shared documents.

These methods have now been used in about 30 online participation and consultation exercises, many of them involving hundreds of people working on really serious issues. For example, the review of UK sustainable development policy they did for Defra this summer received in total more than 8,000 submissions, and they are currently running an even larger process for the German Parliament. Thanks to their nifty data management system, all of it is very easy to surf and explore - they regard transparency and accessibility as key principles of their work - again reflecting the good practice they developed in face-to-face work. They still do lots of that, by the way: one of their current work and training themes is integrating face-to-face and electronic processes.

They are very proud of Dialogue by Design: it is a roaring success and they think a notable contribution to the evolution of e-Democracy, though obviously just another strand among many others.

For more information do visit the website at http://www.dialoguebydesign.com: register on the site if you would like to receive regular short updates on our work. Alternatively, feel free to call the office on 020 8683 6602.

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Introduction 7

The participant is working at the Center for Environmental Law of the University of Amsterdam www.jur.uva.nl/cvm

Over the past four years he has been parttime assigned to XPIN, the Dutch interdepartmental Expertise Bureau for Innovative Policy Making www.xpin.nl

Currently they are putting in writing our experiences over this four year period with innovations in government and governance. Next March a book will appear wherein e-government and e-democracy play an important role. Therefore they are gathering Dutch and also international examples, and they are very much willing to share those with us.

His personal interest regards two main subjects:

1) because of the fact that most innovations in information technology come from companies, and the government is an important user, the market has become more than ever a change agent of government. In studies of public administration this role of the market is not really acknowledged. He is interested in questions how to legitimate governmental change generated by the market, and how the government can influence the market, for instance by way of public procurement; see Government and the market

2) in his view modern governance is a matter of recombination of all kinds of elements that used to be part of traditional government. So elements like civil servants, citizens and their civic associations, policy fields, instruments to execute policies and all kinds of other elements are constantly being recombined in innovative ways. The internet has an important part in that, for instance when it brings together various parties in a debate that's cross cutting traditional policy fields. Food safety is a good example, see www.future-of-food.nl/ (in four languages). The question is what exactly is the role of the internet here, and how easily it recombines itself and therefore generates new recombinations.

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Introduction 8

The participant is Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington Unviersity.

For a couple of years, he was the principal investigator for the Congress Online Project, which was a joint research effort of the Congressional Management Foundation and his university. They studied the U.S. Congress, looked at each of the 610 websites, applied their best practices model, and rated them. The project produced two major reports, written by the CMF, and an on-going electronic newsletter. All this can be found at www.congressonlineproject.org.

The participant has written a number of book chapters and articles dealing with online communication. He is an editor of the new Journal of e-Government, and he published a couple of months ago a book, Congress Online: Bridging the Gap Between Citizens and Their Representatives (Routledge, 2004).

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Introduction 9

The participant is from Hungary, but spends a scholarship in Salzburg, Austria. She actually finished as an economist and is doing her second diploma in political sciences. She is in her last year of studies and plan to write a thesis about eDemocracy, more particulary, how ICTs affect participation and the quality of democracy. In Hungary this issue is still not too common, but there are already the first small seeds. The participant plans to go further with this subject. She hopes to take part in some researches concerning Hungarys edemocratical development. In Salzburg at the University, more specific at the ICTs Centre of Salzburg University she is doing a group-research about within named subject, with the leading of Prof. Maier-Rabler.

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Introduction 10

The participant is an ICT and e-Gov specialist and a Social Entrepreneur with over 27 years experience in India and North / South America (Mexico and Caribbeans).

His organization, Life Line to Business has developed a web enabled, platform independent, paperless communication solution using open source technology, for introducing transparency and accountability in Governments, corporates, institutions and NGOs, leading to better e-Governance. The tool has been adopted in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, India.

They have developed a e-Platform for Industrial guidance Bureau integrating 21 departments electronically to grant time bound single window clearance, thereby encouraging setting-up of industries, generating local employment, alleviating poverty, achieving UN MDGs, etc. The tools used are J2EE, Apache / Tomact, MySQL all running on Linux platform.

A case study appeared in The Digit magazine.More details can be seen at http://ll2b.blogspot.com.

In addition to working with the State Governments, they are trying to work with NGOs to take ICT to rural areas for the benfit of the rural masses, particularly, for the upliftment of women, through the various women kiosk operators and support them with the very basic and fundamental tools such as goal setting, activity planning and monitoring, finance management and inventory management for individuals, self help groups, professional and NGOs.

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Introduction 11

The participant is a PhD and faculty member of Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. Helectures in Knowledge Management, IT Governance and Service Management, and Management Information Systems. He is conducting research in e-consultation, with the Queensland State Government, Office of Urban Management and e-Democracy Unit. They have initiated consultation forums on South East Queensland regional development (SEQ2021) to engage the public and obtain feedback on a draft regional plan and any potential future development issues for the region.

The Queensland Government are conducting these forums both off and online therefore the data will provide an avenue for comparative analysis of off and online content. This region is the largest to date for which public consultation has been conducted. If you are interested in viewing details of these forums see the links below.

e-Democracy Unit - http://www.communities.qld.gov.au/community/edemocracy.html

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Introduction 12

Participant is a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, and a technical consultant with experience in healthcare management. His interests include Ambulatory Care, Chronic Care, Home Health Care and Case Management, Managed Care, Pediatrics, Health Informatics, E-Health, Distance Education, International Health, Humanization Relief and International Pediatrics. He is also a contributing editor to http://www.politicsonline.com He is interested in best practices for use in public health.

The participant is co-administrator of the Telehealth Professional Discussion List serve and the E-Health Professional Discussion List serve. He is also the assistant editor of the Telehealth News Letter, and a constant observer and writer focused on the use of technology in health care today.

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Introduction 13

The participant is an IT consultant and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at The Australian National University in Canberra. His interests are in electronic document systems and accessibility of web sites. This involves the more nuts-and-bolts end of e-democracy.

He suggests as an interesting way to focus some of the discussion of e-democracy to do it on a mobile phone screen. The challenge is then to come up with something which will work with limited communications and computing resources.

Some items which may be of interest:

• > ACCESSIBLE WEB PAGES
• ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS
• ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT RECORDS

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Introduction 14

Participant is a student Public Administration (Leiden University), currently working for XPIN, the Dutch interdepartmental Expertise Bureau for Innovative Policy Making (see www.xpin.nl).

Together with another participant in this project - she is working on a book about policy innovations, like e-government and e-democracy, which will be publiced in March next year. They have already gathered current, appealing projects on this subject. By participating in this project, they could share cases and experiences on e-democracy with you all and XPIN could get an overview of relevant projects and developments on e-democracy in the world.

She sees e-democracy (and e-government in general) as an important and interesting subject.

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Introduction 15

Participant is Postdoctoral Research Fellow (ESRC) at the University of East Anglia. His PhD analysed government-run online discussion forums at the local, national, and EU levels. His theoretical contribution was that it is possible to design into websites and discussion forums facilities and structures which promote discourse and deliberation if we learn from existing practice and ensure that designers (and other stakeholders) have a clear understanding of the theoretical (and practical) underpinnings. The empirical evidence generally supported this argument. It can be found in: 'Design Matters: the Political Efficacy of Government-run discussion forums', and is in Gibson, R. Oates, S. and Owen,D. (2005) Civil Society, Democracy and the Internet, London: Routledge. The participant is currently researching in several areas of the e-democracy field, with an emphasis on the participative, deliberative, and communicative aspects of government-citizen and citizen-citizen communication.

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Introduction 16

Participant is a Harvard Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government (a joint fellow between the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs). He is currently working on a book on the topic of the impact of interactive technologies on politics and government. He works closely with NDI and the ways that NGO's, Governments, and Civil Society organizations use the digital media to organize, communicate, and transact. His background is from the entrepreneurial world of e-commerce. He has helped develop most of the original e-commerce software and systems (shopping, banking and travel) from the earliest inceptions of online services through the proliferation of the Internet. Since 1998, he has turned his attention to focusing on the impacts of interactive communications technologies.

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Introduction 17

The participant tells us that in Northern Ireland there has been a lot of democratic invention in response to "the troubles". It hasn't been enough to solve our problems, but they have ameliorated the situation, and will work wonderfully in less fractured societies.

Back in 1997, the participant took one innovation, the preferendum, a meeting and voting system that could often find consensus between extremely opposed groups, and showed how it could be put on the WWW (see http://www.deborda.org/, especially the voting system CD-ROM and http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/papers/prefer/).The participant first met Steven Clift when they both turned up in Vienna that year for what might have been the first international conference on voting, rating and annotation on the Internet.

Then we had devolution. Suddenly, all the public sector bodies were forced to consult on their policies (and especially the equality impact). 120 public authorities sent out 25-page consultation documents to the same few hundred community and voluntary groups, expecting replies in the same 8 weeks. Since then, people from both sectors have been meeting here to study how to use e-consultation to do better than that. http://econsult.mgt.qub.ac.uk/

They ran a workshop in June 2001, and started a research project in March 2004, together with Maynooth University and the Letterkenny Institute of Technology, aiming to find out how best to use e-consultation with communities that have been affected by conflict, and to produce a practical guide to e-consultation for groups in Northern Ireland and the border counties.

They are just putting finishing touches on a survey of consultation practices, north and south, and an overview of e-consultation technologies with a crude table to help select technologies according to the task or activity you want to support. That really isn't good enough, but to do better, we need to get our heads around how we can judge one consultation "better" than another.

Best practice for whom? Citizens wanting to take-part in joint planning, citizens wanting to leave it up to politicians,civil servants wanting no-one to comment, civil servants wanting to reach everyone, ...?

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Communication problems Best practice for whom? Citizens wanting to take-part in joint planning, citizens wanting to leave it up to politicians,civil servants wanting no-one to comment, civil servants wanting to reach everyone, ...?

Introduction 18

Participant is very interested in the e-democracy best practice network for professional and research reasons even if sometimes it is hard to think about e-Democracy where Democracy is still an unknown term. She is attending the First Edition of the Executive Master Program on e-Governance coordinated by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in collaboration with internationally recognized institutions in Europe, North America and Asia.

After serving in the last three years the UN (DESA/DPADM) seconded to the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), based in Morocco, to coordinate the African Online Regional Centre of the United Nations Online Network in Public Administration and Finance ? UNPAN (www.unpan.org ), this participant is currently working as Independent Adviser on Governance and Public Administration for CAFRAD, and other International and Regional Organizations, with particular focus on e-government and innovation in public service.

She is the promoter of the CAFRAD/NEPAD/UNDESA e-Africa initiative for good governance: building e-governance capacity in African countries. She is undertaking a research on ICTs for IDRC and UNECA for Local Governance in Africa (LOG-IN Africa), within the framework of the Preparatory process of the WSIS 2005.

The participant was working in the private sector, and for the European Commission, in regional and international development, and in technological and innovation transfer.

Her concern is therefore how to 'transfer' the 'best practice' from rich to developing countries thus considering not only the ICT solutions, but also the environment in which they are introduced and the key for successful integration with the local context and culture.

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Introduction 19

Participant was actively involved in the early days of what was then called 'Government Online' (GOL), and served on the G-8 GOL international working group from 1997 to 2001 as the Government of Canada representative. He currently teaches 'Governance and the Digital Imperative' at both the undergrad and graduate level at the University of Ottawa School of Political Studies as well as the School of Management. He holds a Master of Public Health Administration and an Executive Master of Electronic Commerce degree. He is mainly focused on government-led citizen-centered electronic service delivery (ESD) on the one hand, and on public sector intranets, the latter largely as a means to enabling ESD. E-governance (except for its e-government component) is a fairly new area for him. The participant is appalled by the democratic deficit so obvious in our society, and would like to do something about it, using technologies as a complement to other existing means in achieving better governance. His particular interest is in the technology/human interface: the challenges and opportunities it presents as well as the obstacles/threats it must overcome to help restore democratic equilibrium. He originally dealt with issues such as digital divide or privacy and protection of personal information. Presently, his interest is moving towards more fundamental questions and concerns:

• From the citizens as well as the government perspective, how can we build a strong business case for technology-enabled governance,

and what would it contain (how and in what way do anticipated benefits in technology-enabled governance outweigh up-front personal/collective investment costs -time-/learning curves. And once we have found a satisfactory answer to this question, what is the optimal strategy for achieving short/medium term tangible e-governance results? In many instances, the proper "market analysis" for specific e-governance and/or e-democracy "products" has not been properly carried out: the dominating assumption was that it was the right way to go, that "we'll build it and they'll all come" But this rather optimistic (some would say: unrealistic) view of e-governance has not translated into reality, at least not in Canada. Providing as exhaustive a list of "nice to have" e-democracy tools may sound appealing, but do we have a proper e-democracy "maintenance manual" to start with? How and in what circumstances should we use these tools? Where should we start? With whom? The revised template in our project goes some distance towards focusing on these fundamental questions. But this should not deter us from trying to deal with some of the tougher questions.

• In Canada the market for the e-democracy side of e-governance is in its infancy and evolving very slowly even though there is a demonstrated appetite on the part of citizens for increased engagement (but only on issues that they view as meaningful to them). On the one hand, demand for increased e-democracy appears to be modest and mainly driven by a small cadre of social activists and academics whose voice tends to get lost in the concert of day-to-day public issues and priorities (health, the economy, Canada/US relations, and public spending scandals). And on the other, offer (by various levels of government) tends to be crisis-driven (no major crisis, no major development) or purely motivated by episodic ('now you see them, now you don't') electoral motives.

The focus for now should be primarily directed towards the e-government side of e-governance, i.e. on modernizing existing state processes to improve performance with respect to service delivery and policy-making. Perhaps the list of so-called 'e-democracy' online features that has been in the making these last few days can be reviewed (and reduced) with the above in mind.

There is a profound need to ensure that proper context is provided when outlining best practices and/or preferred features. In 2001, the G-8 GOL international group undertook, under U.K. leadership, to assemble 'Government Online' best practices. More than 20 countries provided inputs including examples, but in many instances, largely owing to time and space limitations, contextual information tended to be minimal if not entirely missing. In the opinion of this participant, this restricted the universal application of some of the lessons learned (and corresponding best practices) as readers had difficulty determining, for instance, what dynamic forces had led to what result. Hopefully, the template that we are considering can deal with this kind of issues.

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Introduction Alle van Meeteren

Alle studied law and philosophy. He is interested in Usenet. Usenet gives a good opportunity for written communication. He has an idea to make the communication via Usenet better. It is called 'thread-president' (TP). It functions like Slashdot, but not a group of selected people influences the presentation of a posting, but one individual, the orginal, who started a thread. There will be a kind of socializing around persons.

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Introduction 21

Participant runs a company called Everyone Counts which provides Internet voting ,since 1997. They have provided some quite large private Internet elections and one public sector Internet pilot for the UK ODPM. More recently they volunteered the Internet voting for the US-wide National Student Parent Teacher Mock Elections and the Florida Kids Vote Too Internet election pilots on US election day. They provide a do-it-yourself system which lets non-technical people build and run Internet elections which are fully PKI-enabled, provided published source codes, voter inclusion receipting and "locking" of the voting software from modification". They have run hundreds of online ballots of varied form and function. Apart from having to appreciate the minutiae of Internet security, end-user needs, local laws and myriad of other things, they have recently come to see that Internet voting probably only represents the very least the Internet can do for democracy and that traditional voting activity (one-off, one-way, centralised etc) is not a great fit with the technology or culture of the Internet. They have taken this news in two ways : they are trying to make Internet voting a "light weight", distributed activity, and they are looking at how to improve other tools (particularly forums and anonymous polls) so that they are more usable and more representative. The participant still believes that the Internet will finally provide a more inclusive model for governance that will scale, and a model that already has the mobility to force change at the bureaucratic end and not remain a "laboratory curiosity". He feels that there is a lot of duplication, noise and unchecked naughtiness in online democracy. He thinks technology can help with this. He won't preach "artificial intelligence" or any such mumbo-jumbo as a way government can "process" the new voices from the community that the Internet has finally patched into bureaucracy. It takes another person to understand an elegant suggestion so we can't leave this discovery to "intelligent word filters". The participant hopes to pass on his discoveries in having (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) automated democratic processes.

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Introduction 22

The participant works as an executive advisor in the EMEA Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) in Cisto Systems with responsibility for European Central Government e-strategy in general and German Federal and Local Government in particular. He chairs the eGovernment group for "German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunication and New Media (BITKOM)" and carry various trusted advisor roles within the German public sector.

Prior to joining Cisco in 2003, he was Head of Public Services for Central region of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and before that he worked as a Senior Manager for KPMG Consulting Germany.

In 1994 he left the Public Sector where he worked for several state authorities and ministries as well as for the European Commission. After dealing with Public Sector Reform he has for many years been involved in design and implementation of eGovernment services.

He is editor of a book "Connected Government" that Cisco Systems will publish next month. It includes 14 essays from government senior officials around the world which are describing their whole-of-government strategies or part of it. The most advanced eGovernment strategies includes the issue of eParticipation and digital inclusion. ‘‘‘ Reactions ‘‘‘

Introduction 23

The participant is an associate professor and used to head the department of Development Communication in a private University here. She is currently (Dec 2004) on study leave pursuing my Ph D in Communication in the University of the Philippines.

She has been involved in e-government research in a study she made as a fellow of the Asian Scholarship Foundation, and was based in Malaysia last year to conduct the study. Her research focused on e-governance mechanisms, as implemented in a local Malaysian government using IT tools to communicate with its citizens. The participant is continually interested in e-governance and e-democracy, and this year she is looking at the online advocacy mechanisms practiced here in the Philippines, and later, will do a comparative study as practiced in other southeast asian countries. ‘‘‘ Reactions ‘‘‘

Introduction 24

Participant's experiences during the past decade have given him expertise in the rapid deployment of digital cable and broadband, and in the ability of high speed connectivity to create value through the deployment and integration of video, Internet, telephony, etc.. His formative experiences include work with television and radio broadcasters on advanced digital strategies; work with Internet start-ups; my doctoral research in this field, and a graduate business degree in finance.

Accomplishments:

In 1994, as part of his Ph.D. research, he co-founded the world's first interactive political Web site. Minnesota E-Democracy continues to thrive locally, and is hailed across the world as a significant model for incorporating interactive technologies into local media systems and political processes.

In 1997, he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, where he focused on the impact of the Internet on the media and politics. After completing his Ph.D., he won a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council to study e-democracy / e-activism in Canada, and worked as a member of the faculty at Cambridge.

Around that time he was also a lead developer for the UK's first virtual think-tank. In 1997, as part of 'Nexus' the Policy and Ideas Network, they produced a pioneering nation-wide electronic consultation with some of Great Britain's leading intellectuals, followed by a strategy meeting at 10 Downing Street hosted by Prime Minister Blair. 'E-Democracy' was put squarely on the policy agenda in the briefing report following the session: (http://www.netnexus.org/library/papers/3way.html). At Nexus, they also experimented with local e-democracy efforts, such as the CAM-ISSUES forum (http://www.netnexus.org/forum/cam-election/)

From 1998 to 2002, he consulted with local television and radio broadcasters to develop widely influential business strategies related to media convergence.

Just recently, he received an MBA in finance from Fordham University in New York City.

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Introduction Babarinsa Oladapo

Babarinsa shares the following thoughts with us.

ICT A GIVEN TOOL FOR E-GOVERNMENT

Given the speed with which Information Communication Technology (ICT) is developing and the breadth of their socio-economic impact, it is imperative that Africa is not excluded from the technological revolution. The use of ICT has been integrated into virtually every aspect of commerce, education, governance, and civic activity in developed countries and has become a critical factor in creating wealth worldwide. Yet in Africa, ICT has barely taken a foothold. Computer illiteracy and the lack of access to ICT are widely recognized as an increasingly powerful obstacle to the economic, civic, and political development of Africa. Believably, technology offers a way for the African Diaspora to give back to Africa even though there are many obstacles. ”Africa is the most unconnected place, in an increasingly connected world,” A leader once suggested. For example, that only 10 percent of the people in Africa have telephones or television and only 25 percent have access to a radio. The best SOLUTION to my knowledge is to build a network of entrepreneurs from Africa living in North America and Europe who will contribute to promoting digital opportunities in Africa. This will allow Africans to advance their own interests through collaboration and the exchange of ideas, while meeting the broader goal of supporting ICT-enhanced development activities in their home countries.

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Usenet in Africa

Hauben (1997) signalled that people described Usenet as the poor man's Arpanet, in the early days. I (AvM) think that it can become the poor government's WWW. A government does not have to exploit a website, nor to attract the attention of the population, if it makes use of Usenet. The government just follows the discussion between the persons who are linked and mingle itself in the discussion when it is thought to be useful. When the Africans in the diaspora decide to develop one news-hierarchy, they will find one another there. There is no need of a special forum on a special website. But... I am a little idealistic.

Introduction 26

The participant is interested in E-Democracy, because it can be an improvement of communication between his government, specifically elected officials, and the constituents that vote them into office. He believes that all the spin, misinformation, propoganda, etc. will be less effective (and hopefully reduced) if people know it's false... as a result of good communication during campaigns and while officials are in office. This will strengthen democracy and give each individual voter more power. It's time for the dog (citizens) to wag the tail (Parties) again.

The experiences of the participant are:

• Having helped with several campaigns (City Council, Mayoral, US Senate) and with grassroots organizations (MoveOn.org and ThisMatters).
• Full-time Web Developer/Webmaster for several radio stations; communicate our message with 100k+ listeners each month).
• Also he contributes his skills to political organizations/campaigns and he does contract work for private companies.
• TheWeeklyBush was a project of him during the 6 months leading up to the 11/2 election. The site is meant to communicate points in a manner that is welcoming to those not overly into politics, and buzzworthy to attract attention.

Education:

• BA in Chemistry, minors in Management and Asian Studies (St. Olaf, MN)
• International Summer School, University of Oslo
• Hundreds of hours of computer training.
• Study abroad programs and personal travel add up to a year spent outside of the United States.

Next project: CitizenPurple

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Introduction 27

The participant works as an expert at the Committee for Information Technology and Communication within the Chamber of Deputies of Romania.

She is managing partner at an e-democracy project - edemocratie. She edited a weekely newsletter and she was co-author of a study regarding the websites of the two chambers of the parliament in terms of accesibility, content and usability.

She held a lab-course on e-government and e-democracy at the Faculty of political sciences of the National School of Administrative and Political Sciences, spring 2004..

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Introduction 28

The participant cofounded CivicActions LLC with some partners, one Tech Lead on the Dennis Kucinich for President campaign and the other Tech Guru for Dean's campaign. They are an open-source/free-software technology-based, political consulting company.

The participant is a technology project manager and campaign consultant committed to the transformation of politics through innovative and pioneering technologies. Prior to CivicActions, he served as a syndicated columnist, non-profit director, IT manager and workshop facilitator. He now brings his deep understanding of technology tools and advocacy into the political arena for both local and national campaigns.

Recently he has been researching literature (as background) and technology tools used in the 2004 US National Election for a new report on behalf of the PACE Foundation. Some of this research is on our WIKI at wiki of civicactions

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Introduction Norman Greenfield

Norman is working in the political communications world, and is studying towards a Masters Degree in Political Communications. He has double barrelled interest in E-Democracy, the Democratic Deficit, Politicians, Young Voters, and the dumbing down of the political arena.

His studies focus around political communications, e-democracy, the electorate and where they are and what they do, and reconnecting the elected officials to the electorate after they are elected.

His business is focused on consulting, writing, and commenting on all things political on the federal scene in Canada, specifically in Western Canada. Specifically through the use of a combination of new and old media.

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Introduction 30

Participant had a variety of positions in the City of Stockholm administration. He was with SIDA, the Swedish International Development Authority. He did a lot of market research for US embassy. He helped to bring Dell to Sweden by telling them to remember that over 50% of PC sales in Sweden goes to or through the so called public sector.

Participant was a graduate student in Business Admin at the University of Minnesota. He did his undergrad work in Economics and Political Science at Dickinson College in his native state of Pennsylvania.

His passion is eDemocracy and eGovernment. He managed for 5 years the Kista Borough attemps to further eDemocracy in that Borough (and some would say got “fired” for the attempt) He doe a lot of international eDemocracy watching for my Swedish colleagues in the University and public sector worlds. He is a senior advisor to a small IT company who lives off sales for organizational internal democracy while trying to cut through tremendous political and structural hinders in the public sector for “empowering the people” so that sales can even be made there.

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Introduction Steven Clift

Steven is an online strategist and public speaker focused on the use of the Internet in democracy, governance, and community. For the last decade he has worked to fundamentally improve democracy and citizen participation through the use of the Internet. He seeks to change the world one e-mail at a time....

He is the host of the DoWire web site. DoWire is his "public service" effort supported by his speaking and consulting.

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Introduction 32

Participant works as the Executive Director of an albanian NGO - Albanian Socio Economic Think-Tank ASET

As an organization they have developed different kind of projects in different fields, but only a few in democracy. They have also applied for a project in the field of democracy but they don't have the approval of the grant.

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Introduction Peter Davison

Peter has a BA in Poltical Science from Acadia University. While at Acadia University, Peter served as a research assistant to Dr. Renate Eigenbrod on a project promoting Native Canadian Literature & Curriculum development. The end result was an interdisciplinary meeting of key stakeholders in Nova Scotia, Canada.

In 2001, He presented 2 papers at the McMaster Peace Symposium and followed up in 2002 with a Bronze medal for his work on Urban Agriculture as a Community Economic Development model at the Acadia University Social Entrepreneurship Competition. Pls see: short clip of award winning presentation

In 2003, Peter worked on a local Green Party of Ontario campaign team and contributed to a stronger recognition of the greens at the local level. In 2004, Peter ran as a Green Party of Canada Candidate in the Canadian Federal Election and achieved 4.5% of the popular vote in his riding. Pls see: short clip of cbc interview

Currently, Peter is managing partner of a fair trade & organic coffee company called One World Coffee. It's primary goal is to increase the amount of fair trade coffee being imported into the Canadian market. He also enjoys being an adhoc political commentator and is currently following the following issues:

1. Public space

2. E-Democracy

3. Food Security

4. Fair Trade

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Introduction 34

The participant works in the e-Democracy team at the e-Government Unit, part of the UK Cabinet Office. It is a small team of three; along with *** and ***.

They are looking generally at how new technology could be used to facilitate and improve democratic relationships - primarily that between the government and the public as this is where they could have influence.

They produced a consultation document on e-Democracy in 2002 " In the service of democracy", but the team's main work is currently centred on research, identifying good and innovative practice of e-participation and sharing this knowledge. This has involved setting up a cross government reference group which acts as a hub for the sharing of this information, working with those in central government departments who are running participative exercises with an "e-enabled" aspect, developing guidance for those preparing to run an e-participative exercise - work in progress contributing to an online community for local and central government (this is going to become part of the updated http://www.edemocracy.gov.uk site) working closely with the National Project for Local e-democracy here in the UK, feeding a number of case studies through to RSE - these are UK based ones. trying to keep up to date with the latest thinking, particularly on the myriad of blogs on the subject!

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Introduction 35

The participant is working as E-Democracy Project Manager for the Royal Borough of Kingston, a local authority in the UK.

She is managing three projects for the Local eDemocracy National Project: - Online petitioning (together with Bristol council) - Online surgeries with young people - Partnership with BBC iCan (together with St Albans, Stroud and North Lincolnshire councils)

The first two projects relate to traditional democratic processes, and how these can be translated and enhanced online. The partnership with iCan is exploring ways that councils can work with the BBC to build the site's content and help residents to use iCan.

The epetitioning services went live in September 2004. Outreach workshops and promotional events with iCan run to the end of February 2005.

She worked in the E-Democracy Unit in Queensland, Australia (on ConsultQld, epetitions and the online broadcast of parliament).

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Introduction Chan-Gon Kim

He is a Ph.D Candidate of public administration at Rutgers University-Newark, U.S.A. and a researcher on e-government at E-Governance Institute of Rutgers University. He has experience in evaluating e-government of 100 large cities worldwide in 2003. The report can be found at http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~egovinst/Website/researchpg.htm He is currently writing a dissertation on digital democracy.

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Craig Hubley

This introduction has been made via the wiki only, in order to encourage people to read and use it.

User:Craig_Hubley has Craig's introduction on DoWire.Org:Itself.

Craig's user page at livingplatform.ca has a much more extensive political bio.

Craig's professional bio.

Reactions, nasty comments, trolling and abuse

All comments welcome - I play by Crocker's Rules.

Jordi Barrat i Esteve

Hi,

My name is Jordi Barrat. I am assistant professor in constitutional law and a member of the Electronic Voting Observatory of the University of Leon (Spain). Please check the following webs for further details:

Personal Web Page [1]

Electronic Voting Observatory [2]

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