#2 - e-Gov and e-Democracy

Observation:

From Comparative Project on Local e-Democracy Initiatives in Europe and North America
by Michael N. Peart and Javier Ramos Diaz
e-Democracy Centre, Research Centre on Direct Democracy, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva, Switzerland (http://edc.unige.ch/edcadmin/images/ESF%20-%20Local%20E-Democracy.pdf) (Peart and Diaz, 2007, p. 6)

"The third type of e-democracy initiative is that which attempts to recreate a
sense of the public sphere online. In general, these initiatives offer citizens of the
local region or municipality the option of participating in a discussion forum that is
intended to be a space to raise issues of local importance."

This is the type of e-democracy initiative that e-democracy.org supports with its community forums.

What problems could e-democracy help solve:
From the same paper (p. 46), " three major problems that face America’s democracy today are, as is typical of well-developed, Western democracies: low voter turnout, low perceived levels of accountability of political representatives, and a lack of enthusiasm among the youth population."

How e-democracy.org's forums fit into the three-part typology of Peart and Diaz (2007):
"the examples in the United States fell heavily in the category of transparency. For that reason, this section will proceed in the reverse order from the typology given: deliberation, participation, and transparency. Given the abundance of samples, at least one is given for each category and subgroups specified in order to illustrate the idea in practice. The deliberation category accounts for 9% of the cases uncovered. There are two major types of e-democracy initiative in this group. The first type is the provision of an online forum where citizens can interact with each other concerning issues of local importance. A quintessential example of this practice is the web forum"


What can the Washington State Legislature do? Possibly something like the Colorado State Legislature. They host a web site where citizens can post their suggestions for referenda as part of a legal process for putting a referendum on the state ballot. (Peart, Diaz, 2007, p. 51)
http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/lcsstaff/initiative.htm

p. 53
"Six of the eleven states survey offer video webcasts of the legislative sessions either live or archived. Colorado’s is possible the most advanced, offering webcasts that are broken down into subcommittee as well as general body meetings."

p. 56
"Furthermore, the American democracy is heavily focused on representation, meaning citizens tend to pay attention to politics around election times drastically more than other times. As such, there is probably not much market pressure for e-democracy services that allow citizens to participate. It is surprising that deliberative websites are not more commonly funded by governments, however. Therefore, it is likely that the next round of innovations in e-democracy will come from the parties and from private political advocacy groups that seek to organize large amounts of supports."