Eurocities Award for Participation
November 24, 2006 Posted by Kevin in : Digital Challenge, Awards , trackback
Bristol City Council Leader Barbara Janke and Stephen Hilton, collecting the award.
Although there have been a couple of posts already (this one and this one) covering the Eurocities Conference in Manchester its probably worth stretching your patience with a third to mention the fact that we did in fact win the Eurocities Award for Participation with the Campaign Creator project.
Here is a pic of the trophy I took with the webcam on my MacBook. It looks a lot more splendid in real life.
Connecting Bristol is the city’s response to the Digital Challenge.
Comments»
Congratulations. How many awards is that now?
Hi Shane- just the two so far, but the Observatorio Internacional de la Democracia Participativa have also shortlisted it for an International award http://213.27.152.18/oidpart/angles/v_bones_cand.php
If the Campaign Creator project is worthy of an award for participation, I can only conclude this much vaunted future of eDemocracy and eParticipation is rather bleak.
A cursory visit to the site reveals that the site has, in the space of around a year, attracted around 30 members who have between them engaged in no discussion whatsoever.
The site itself is a platform to download a reasonably useful - if partial - document on running a campaign. The various sections of this document have been downloaded between 120 and 300 times.
These figures are miniscule when compared to the big beasts of the web such as Myspace who attract millions of participants. And even when compared to successful not-for-profit community sites such as
Urban 75 or DIY news sites like Indymedia, which attract thousands of members and tens of thousands of hits a day, the prognosis is poor.
On the evidence of this site it seems reasonably fair to conclude that the internet is unlikely to bring about the democratic renaissance many techno-evangelists would have us believe.
Now, I'm off to read the paper…
Are you just jealous?