World e-Democracy Forum

Controversy in South-Australia about political Internet comments

Adelaide, Capital of the State of South Australia, is stricken by a controversy during the State election campaign. During an election period, "a person must not publish material consisting of, or containing a commentary on, any candidate or political party, or the issues being submitted to electors, in written form, in a journal published in electronic form on the Internet or by radio or television or broadcast on the Internet, unless the material or the programme in which the material is presented contains a statement of the name and address of a person who takes responsability for the publication of the material".

Internet can be muzzled?

"Virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls" said Hillary Clinton, last January 21, in a very important speech on Internet freedom. We can see it every day in Iran, China, Viertnam, Burma and in many countries a spike in threats to the free flow of information. It also happening in Europe, in Belarus, where President Lukashenko has signed a decree regulating the dissemination of information on the, in the context of a tumultuous presidential election, next year.

The Modern Democracy Magazine No. 2 is available

The new issue of "Modern Democracy" is available for download in .pdf format on the website e-Voting.cc.

Most interesting articles: Wahl-O-Mat, a german voting navigator, state-of-the-art of e-Voting worldwide or about securisation  of voting technology. According to Robert Krimmer, Managing Director of e-voting.cc, 2,000 subscribers worldwide have been registered since the first edition, last spring.

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eDEM10 Conference: call for papers

Scientific eDemocracy visions and models have been developed since the 1960s, but it is now, during the first decade of the 21st Century, that they are becoming reality, being tested and implemented. Extensive IT provides the necessary basis, but it is not the developments in IT alone that are responsible for successful eDemocracy projects, it is due all those who use and apply them, as they adopt new behaviours and change old ones. The new, digital generation lives and breathes new values: they collaborate, compile content together, share their ideas, create networks on social platforms and organise themselves quickly and simply. The new values held, the new behaviours adopted, the changed mindset, along with improved usability and a still-increasing use of the internet, has led to a rapid and radical change in our society. 

 

The EDem10, which will be held next May 6-7 in Danube-University Krems (80 km from Vienne, Austria) focuses on these changes which can be seen occurring in different areas and which are manifest in different way:

In USA, the net-campaigning is changing

In USA, the election of the Republican Scott Brown to the Senate is a small political bombshell. He has been elected on the seat of Ted Kennedy, an emblematic personnality of the American liberals and he has demonstrated that Republicans know now how to use Internet effectively.

If Micah Sifry, founder of TechPresident, wrote that "the Internet has suggested again and again that it loves an insurgent candidate (Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Barack Obama...)",  he seems to regret that "the Internet's ability to alter the dynamics of US politics--given the existing hard-wiring of the rest of the political process--seems to be far better tuned for "stop this" than "do this."

Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, is thinking that the campaigning online is changing.  "The Internet was for the young, the hip, the multicultural, the liberal. Let the G.O.P. be the party of Fox News. The Democrats would be the party of Google, YouTube and Facebook. But it’s been crumbling ever since Obama took office. Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State’s establishment." He also thinks that "the attempts to turn the campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped".

Haiti and YOU – Do Something More Than Money

HOPE+, an innovative 21st century initiative to unleash the global power of the Internet to tackle the problems of the world, calls its members to do something more thn money for Haiti:

You know the need-you've seen the photos and most of us have already responded with a donation. Good.

Now, HOPE+ wants you to do something more than just give money.

We want three things 1) your time, 2) your friends and 3) your ideas.

1st Your Time - Below are some ways to take action right now, to help - both immediately and long term:

Drop the Debt Petition - Sponsored by ONE for immediate cancellation of Haiti's $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.

'Micro projects' - Led by The Extraordinaries, you can to help sort and tag disaster photos, match the missing to sorted images and search the image database for missing persons.

Volunteer in Your Community - Check out All For Good, search for the key word "Haiti" along with your zip code and find volunteer opportunities in your community.

These may seem like small things, but small things add up, and so much is needed in so many ways.

2nd Your Friends - In the next 24 hours, reach out to 10 of your friends and ask them to get involved with HOPE+, sign up and do what they can to help Haitian relief efforts. Click here to tell your friends about HOPE+ right now.

3rd Your Ideas - What special project do you think we as HOPE+ should do? You've seen other ideas and projects online, check out our blog and give us your best ideas.

HOPE+ is brand new and this is our first big opportunity to do something new and different. Even if it is a small project, what is something special that we could do? Once we hear from you, we'll turn your ideas into action and results on the ground in Haiti.

HOPE+ is about more than just giving money, it's about giving you the resources to get involved in a personal way, along with your friends and to turn the best ideas out there into real action.

Haiti needs YOUR action now.

This is what HOPE+ was made for, but we can't do it without you. I hope you'll step up to join us right now to take action. The real long term impact of this disaster is yet to be seen, and our fellow global citizens in Haiti urgently need our help.

Please do something NOW.

Thanks,
The HOPE+ Team

PS….And, right now Haiti needs money too, so please give again if your can.

£1m for an UK Citizen Crowdsourcing Project?

The British Conservative Party is ready to offer a price of £ 1 million for making an online platform that would allow "the collective wisdom of the British people" to produce innovative ideas in the service of the country.

The prize will be awarded only if the conservative party win in the next general elections, but the idea should mobilize the enthusiasts of "crowdsourcing", popularized by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

According to Wikipédia, crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and a short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions. The idea is to delegate to citizens development projects, ideas or solutions to "solve the problems they have themselves".

According to the party's culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt, cited by Dailymail, "The collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts". Mr. Hunt is close to David Cameron's political guru Steve Hilton, who has pushed the Tories to embrace the so-called 'post bureaucratic age', a term that refers to ways in which technology can be used to hand power to the people.

This idea is controversial in UK, but I think it's interesting to follow it.

Haiti: Internet is the best in crisis situations

It has become so natural that nobody is talking about. It's in crisis situations that Internet is the best. Everyone has seen pictures of this Haitian journalist, Carel Pedre, explaining the situation to his webcam, sending SMS messages and tweets. And it's thanks to the web, via email, Twitter, Facebook or MSN that families may have had news because the country was quickly isolated after the earthquake of January 12.

If Twitter was used as first communication channel, sites such as Ushahidi are providing amazing maps detailing aid and damage. Both Google and Facebook are producing missing persons lists and satellite networks are also diverting resources to provide communications to aid agencies and the military. The UN body Telecoms Sans Frontieres, which maintains a network of telecommunications engineers and mobile equipment worldwide, has deployed two teams in the region, according to the BBC. 

But most important is the role of Internet and mobile telecommunications for donations.

It has become so natural that nobody is talking about. It's in crisis situations that Internet is the best. Everyone has seen pictures of this Haitian journalist, Carel Pedre, explaining the situation to his webcam, sending SMS messages and tweets. And it's thanks to the web, via email, Twitter, Facebook or MSN that families may have had news because the country was quickly isolated after the earthquake of January 12.

If Twitter was used as first communication channel, sites such as Ushahidi are providing amazing maps detailing aid and damage. Both Google and Facebook are producing missing persons lists and satellite networks are also diverting resources to provide communications to aid agencies and the military. The UN body Telecoms Sans Frontieres, which maintains a network of telecommunications engineers and mobile equipment worldwide, has deployed two teams in the region, according to the BBC. 

But most important is the role of Internet and mobile telecommunications for donations.

France is testing online registration on the electoral roll

In France, 3 cities (Issy-les-Moulineaux, Le Havre and Aix-sur-Vienne) are testing online registration on the electoral roll. Six month after the beginning of the experiment, 20% of new voters in Issy-les-Moulineaux have used this online service to register.

In France, you must be registered on the electoral roll of your city before December 31 to participate in elections of the following year.

It is easy to use the online service: you have just connect to the municipal website or the national Monservicepublic.fr (My public services), fill out the form and scan a proof of postal address and of your identity.

The three cities have been selected by the French Ministries of Interior and Finance to test the online service, which could be generalized in case of success to all French cities by the end of 2010.

In France, about 2 million people are registered each year on the electoral roll. To do this, it is necessary to go to the city hall and fill out a paper form, or to send a form by postal mail. A formality considered burdensome and not very modern both by users as municipal services, faced the end of the year in queues that stretch before the city hall at the close of registration on December 31.

The opportunity to register via Internet is part of the first measures taken under the program "Together simplify" driven by Eric Woerth, Minister of Budget, Public Accounts, Public Service and Reform of state. The simplification of administrative procedures is one of the priorities of the modernization of public services expected by users. It is reflected in particular by developing new online services.

eGovernment of Tomorrow as seen by Sweden

Vinnova, the Swedish Governmenal Agency for Innovation Systems published "eGovernment of Tomorrow". In this report, four scenarios are presented for eGovernment in 2020 with the main idea that in the future public participation will grow and trust in government and society will be important.

It is very interesting to read what can imagine the swedish agency: from the idea that "Government goes private" because a private actor emerges with efficiency to the idea of co-production with a strong participation in communities from Government, it is a new style of Government which emerge.

Can we imagine something like a new service "Google Government" in the future?
Or an emerging "Big Brother society" where people felt that, on balance, improved services outweighed the risk to personal integrity?

• To download the full report