Responding to the Information Needs of Citizens in an Open Society

The use of ICTs in community development areas has increased over the past 10 years. This chapter examines how the “Smart Community” concept can help areas of various sizes accomplish a variety of local and regional development processes. The chapter covers such issues the role of citizen participation, the roles of information technologies, the components of a “Smart Community”, the California Smart Communities Program, and the lessons learned to date from the program. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the “digital divide” between people with access to various ICTs and those without access any access to ICTs.

Bridging the Digital Divide

Examined in this chapter is action to address the “digital divide,” and possibilities for extending e-democracy to support wider democratic participation using ICT in local communities. We describe current approaches in Scotland for tackling the digital divide, and we discuss the concept of wired communities. We also refer to “Digital Scotland” initiatives, and we outline the aims and expected outcomes from Scotland’s “Digital Communities” projects. Finally, we suggest how action research could extend electronic democratization into the two digital communities being created in Scotland. The research work we suggest would provide a framework in which to better appreciate the significance of technology in supporting e-democracy at local community levels, and in so doing, contribute knowledge to strategy and planning policies and social and digital inclusion agendas in Scotland.

Metropolitan Governance and Telecommunications Policy

This chapter explores some implications of the emerging telecommunications networks for urban areas and concludes that new networks will do more to support metropolitan governance than to reinforce localism within traditional city and suburban municipal boundaries. Employing U.S. telecommunications policy as its setting, the chapter proposes creation of metropolitan nongovernmental organizations for urban regions to undertake telecommunications policy roles that currently are unaddressed. The proposed Metropolitan Telecommunications Organization (MTO) would represent urbanized areas interests in guiding the build-out of the new public network; in designing the metropolitan telecommunications system, in providing network security, in insuring open access and universal service, and in undertaking other important system governance roles that currently are not being addressed by local governments. In the U.S., MTOs would be an advocate for the values of community in society, including promoting digital democracy, community access centers, metropolitan telecommunications tax equity, and support for community institutions.

Public Information for a Democratic Society

The question of “how wide to open the window” to hear citizen feedback and let them influence local politics is highly topical. The authors provide an informative introduction to the prerequisites for collaboration between citizens and public administration. They claim that the re-engineering focus on citizen participation remains too rooted in old paradigmatic thinking. In order to truly engage citizens, one needs to break out of the confines of 18th century thought and explore how participatory democratic theory can provide the foundation for 21st century political design and alter our concepts of democratic governance. The authors focus on two different projects that have demonstrated how administrators and other government officials can engage citizens in agenda-setting, addressing complex policy issues, and facilitating implementation of policies. These models position citizens as “owners” of government, not as “clients” or even partners in making and implementing policies through choices. One method, called Televote, is a form of scientific polling that elicits informed and considered opinions from randomly selected respondents. The other method, a version of face-to-face meetings, was employed in Uniontown, Alabama to engage citizens on an ongoing basis to establish citizen agendas, develop policies, and implement programs. Finally, the authors reflect how electronic town meetings can be used to help build community and reinvigorate democracy.

ICTs and the Communicative Conditions for Democracy

In this chapter, the contribution of new information and communication technologies to enhancing democracy at the local level is articulated as a practical and empirical question that pertains to the locally established patterns and practices of public communication. It is suggested that in order to realize the democratic potential inherent in ICTs, the compartmentalized, hierarchical and one-way practices of both administrative-political machinery and the mainstream media must be exposed and challenged through concrete action. The article draws upon a participatory action research project in which alternative, dialogical and citizen-oriented forms of web-mediated public communication were created and maintained in close collaboration with grass-roots civic actors and groups. In the experimental project, specific efforts were made to enable and encourage online encounters between those local stakeholders that rarely meet in the discursive public spaces of mainstream media.

What's New? Perspectives on Freedom of Information and the Internet

Critics of the notion or concept of “information society” have often made claims to put the new ICTs into a more historical and institutional context. As a response, in this chapter, the more than 200-year-old right of access to governmental information is selected as a reference point. A comprehensive review of literature reveals that this right can be analyzed from various perspectives. Examples are the politics, policy, and polity perspective; the market perspective; and the citizenship perspective. Each perspective highlights different aspects of the impacts a right of access to information can possibly have. The citizenship perspective turns out to be particularly interesting, because the traditional, but changeable concept of citizenship, and the right of access to information interact with each other. In a second step, the same perspectives can be utilized for an analysis of documents and literature on new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in order to determine whether truly new and original elements are added to what has previously been analyzed in terms of access to information rights. The application of the freedom of information perspectives to Internet-based access to information allows for the identification of interesting research questions on the changing concept of citizenship, the future of national and transnational governance and the future of regulation.

Teledemocratic Innovations that Public Officials Ignore-At Our Great Peril

In this chapter, the author tackles the major problems plaguing representative democracies around the world. Importantly, these problems originate from the alienation of citizens. The problems manifest themselves, for example, in the dramatic decrease of voting turnouts particularly in the United States. There is a disconnect between the citizenry and political power in the field of public administration. Becker maintains that despite much talk about the needs to develop citizen-centered public administration, little practical change can be seen in this respect and by and large, the attempts to make governmental services more accessible by ICT have not lessened citizen’s feelings of estrangement and apathy. Having diagnosed the ills of representative democracy and public administration, Becker discusses new methods to bridge the gap between government and citizens and to fight political apathy. One of the methods of empowering citizens is scientific deliberative polling which has been experimented with successfully since the 1970s. The author also reviews the experiences of electronic town meetings, for example, AmericaSpeaks which was organized in New York in July 2002 to discuss how to rebuild the World Trade Center.

Introduction to Democratic e-Governance

The concept of governance has its roots in the changing role of the state and in a managerialist view of the operations of public administrations. These two discourses have been challenged by another approach, which could be called democratic governance. It emphasizes the interactions between citizens, political representatives and administrative machinery providing a special view of citizens’ opportunities to influence and participate in policy-making and related processes. This perspective opens up a view to the practices in which institutions, organizations and citizens steer and guide society and communities. It provides citizen-centered view of governance which is quite different from managerialist and institutionalist perspectives. Such approaches as communitarianism, teledemocracy, participatory democracy and direct democracy have been presented as alternative modes of governance. In regard to technology, democratic e-governance is based on the idea that new ICTs can be used to facilitate interaction, communication and decision-making processes, thus having a great potential to strengthen the democratic aspects of governance.

The Moderator in Government-Initiated Internet Discussions

The importance of moderation of online policy discussions is widely recognized. However, much less attention has been paid to the social interface in which moderators perform their tasks. In many cases, moderators have to cooperate with civil servants, elected officials and representatives of social organizations. In this chapter I look at the management of six government-initiated online discussions in The Netherlands. It can be concluded that moderators perform various important functions. In this, they contribute to the interactivity and openness of the discussions. But they also form part of a new interface between citizens and public administration with its own power relations and possible biases. It is concluded that moderators have to strike a balance between different parties involved in the discussion. Various provisions are suggested to make this possible.

Bureaucratic Discretion and Deliberative Democracy

Administrative discretion is both a strength and a weakness of contemporary political systems. Governments could not govern without the capacity to fill in legislation with detailed administrative regulations. Further, these regulations tend to reflect far more substantive information about the subjects being regulated than would most legislation coming from the legislature or decisions reached by the courts. The weakness of using discretion in rulemaking is the lack of legitimacy of these rules. Bureaucracies have a less than positive image in most industrialized democracies, and it is often assumed that their decisions are made to aggrandize their own institutional interests, or to serve “special interests” rather than the public. Thus, in order to make rulemaking more legitimate, effective means of oversight and participation for the public as a whole are required. We argue that many of the existing means of oversight are not as effective asthey once may have been. This is true largely because of the volume and complexity of rulemaking activity. In addition, the demands of the public in most democracies for more opportunities for effective participation mean that rulemaking that is done without the opportunity for the public to involve itself is suspect. The deliberative turn in thinking about participation, especially within public administration, may provide the public with opportunities for greater direct oversight, and perhaps also greater legitimacy for the rules adopted.