The more we are empowered by interactive media, the less receptive we are to passive experiences and in fact if your anything like me, the Internet plays a key role in filtering out information, making me my very own director, allowing me to completely personalise what I see and hear. I can’t remember the last time I turned the TV on or read a newspaper. This is a phenomenon that is redefining the role of traditional practices, responding to it is inevitable. Political processes will have to adapt, looking and our recent national elections and the current USA presidential race its plain to see what the role of e-democracy plays, just type Barack Obama into a YouTube search, his breaking all kinds of YouTube records. Don’t think for a minute, this will come down to governments and legislation.

I’d like to share your (qualified) optimism, but there do seem to be genuine conceptual and methodological difficulties as well. As most (though not all) of the claims for eDemocracy relate to public participation in democracy, a couple of literature reviews on equivalent offline make worrying reading.
Rogers & Robinson (2004), reviewing evidence on community engagement for the Home Office, concluded that “[although] there is a strong common sense case to be made for community engagement, there are real difficulties in the way of establishing reliable measures of community engagement and its benefits.”
Warburton et al for Involve (2005), reviewing literature on public participation in policy-making, conclude even more damningly that they have yet to see a single proper analysis of the costs and benefits of participation which adequately deals with intangibles like social capital and improved relationships, or which is able to disaggregate the impact of a project from the ‘confounding variables’ of its political, economic, social and cultural environment.
Clearly we face the same difficulties in seeking to demonstrate the benefits of eDemocacy, and often we’re still left saying, ‘we know it worked, and we’ve got a good idea how it worked, but we can’t demonstrate its efectiveness in a way that convinces policy-makers’.
Perhaps we could do so if only the right structure was in place. In the ‘What do you want from researchers’ thread you said: “researchers need to be supported in conducting long-term studies with a view to drawing major conclusions.”
I agree completely, that’s the ideal way forward. How depressing, with reference to the local e-democracy national project pilots, that Carol is reduced to wishing: “It would be really interesting to carry out a study on testing whether those [long-term] aims have been met or not”. That kind of evaluation should have been inbuilt from the start!

By the way, for those who don’t know me, I’m working with Ann in Leeds at the Centre for Digital Democracy, on a study of European eParticipation. It’s not a very long-term study, unfortunately, but we are starting by developing what we hope is a robust enough analytical framework to better conceptualise the full benefits of eParticipation and the factors that affect outcomes in the real world.

The first one is that I’ve seen this all before…
A new technological application development arrives and those researchers that are at the forefront of the development stay cautious, using words like ‘potentially’ it could do this but noting that nothing is proven. Then along comes some individuals or organisations that want to reap rewards for the new approach and they start preaching how this new technological development can save the human race (democracy in this case) – all we get is hype and more hype, until people believe the hype but get really disappointed when the technology doesn’t deliver and then they start to become very cautious. This is even when the original researchers are saying you need to evaluate, evaluate and do more evaluation to understand the emerging practice.

I believe we are at this stage with eDemocracy. It hasn’t delivered on the hype and nor would we, as researchers, expect it to, but local authorities are being more cautious because of this and this may give an impression of staleness. Like Stephen, I would interpret this sobriety rather than staleness.

At conferences and workshops I have been urging independent evaluation of eDemocracy projects so that we really understand what is happening and also understand what might happen.
We need an honest debate on how projects have progressed not how well the ‘owners’ want them to have progressed.

I totally agree with Carol when she says that most of the pilots in the national project hadn’t really got going so it was difficult to see exactly what we had learned and indeed my report stated exactly that constraint. However a number of years later and there are still very few well-documented eDemocracy initiatives. Typically, where there are descriptions, these tend to describe the technology in a one-off project setting and give user feedback. These descriptions of isolated experiments with systems raise more issues and challenges than they currently address. Critically, for evaluation purposes, governments are still relying on questionnaires that deal with user satisfaction levels to assess whether local democracy is being enhanced by eDemocracy.

At Leeds, under the Demo-Net network of excellence we are developing a framework for evaluating projects encompassing a range of methods and perspectives. It would be useful to have a wider discussion.

Let’s really start to understand what is happening rather than assuming the best.

Unfortunately Stephen, I cannot trace the author of this bogus post, only where their IP address is registered. A reverse IP search tells me that the Coleman impostor is based in central England, possibly in or near Bath… or Derby (IP searching is a bit inconsistent).

I note that the IP address used is the same as the “anon” poster in the previous thread. So they are likely to be one and the same person.

In the spirit of openness I will leave this post (although I have put in a note to say it isn’t you). If it happens again I will be less polite.

It falls to me to respond directly to the question about Campaign Creator, which was a Bristol project funded by Government as part of the round 2 e-innovations programme. These projects were well funded but the down side was the short timescale, which made even the national e-democracy programme look leisurely.

We openly published all project documentation at the time, including the budget. From memory, we spent approximately £40K on the national campaign website, which was developed by a Bristol company called SIFT. We paid a company in Bath called Engino to develop the campaign application, possibly £50-60K. We paid Friends of the Earth and RSE Consulting to research and author a campaign guide and subsequently distributed several thousand copies of this worldwide. We developed a training course with the Scarman Trust and subsequently trained and recruited a dozen or so community campaign coaches. We bought 10 laptops, which we now lend out to community groups, such as Bristol Wireless, for events and training. We held a number of events (including the very scary Activists and Authorities conference). We ran a marketing campaign, paid Gallomanor for project management, design and user-testing, we ran a community campaign stakeholder group…

I remain very unhappy that we have not found a way to keep Campaign Creator going. Scarman Trust tried to obtain Lottery funding to roll the project out nationally but this hasn’t worked out. It is not, of course, very easy to find funding to support this type of grass roots e-democracy campaign activity…

If the pretend Stephen Coleman cares to email me directly, I will pass on whatever documentation s/he feels they need.

Stephen H

But let’s not play silly buggers. I assume that if someone’s able to put up a post in my name, someone else is able to find out who did it and expose them.

What happened to the DCLG funded Bristol Campaign Creator?

http://www.campaigncreator.org/holding_page/

How many thousands did that cost?

My point is that even with energetic and innovative individuals local govt is inherently very cautious. When we’ve researched the area (for ICELE incidentally) we’ve found officers spending years devising e-democracy strategies only to have the door shut in their face by risk adverse members and senior officers afraid to “let the floodgates open”.

This innovation-wary culture in most local authorities is what is making the local eDemocracy conversation stale. On a positive note perhaps the new participatory budgeting and citizen empowerment strategies to come out of DCLG may re-energise the subject in councils up and down the country.