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Active Citizenship Goal Delayed by Lack of E-democracy Vision

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People and e-democracy
The idea of e-democracy was supposed to be that people could influence the decisions affecting them by using new technology to make their voices heard. This would create “active citizens” who would take a greater part in their local communities, leading to more consensus and harmony all round. Great idea, but in practice the idea is still very much an ideal.

Reflection! without technology
Did you ever try to find a book in Foyles bookshop in the days when they displayed them by publisher? A thorough search for a book on paintings by Matisse would need visits to seven sections on two different floors.

Constructive searches
Finding out how you can influence decisions on, say, crime and policing is a similar exercise on the web. First you need to know that local authorities use the word “consultation” to describe the process of asking people for their opinions about issues (and many people don’t know that). Then, if you live in London and want to search for consultations on crime, you might look on the Metropolitan Police website, any one of the 33 London Borough websites, the Greater London Authority site, YourLondon.gov.uk and several others, about forty altogether. On each website, the search usually throws up hundreds of irrelevant pages and documents as well as those you want. Well, speaking for myself, I’d love to be an “active citizen” but right now it’s just too much of a sweat to be worth the effort.

Using the technology
Like so many of the promises of new technology, the problem with e-democracy is not with the technology itself – that’s the easy bit – it is with the human factors behind it. The technology will allow people to easily find consultations and to respond to them online has been around for a few years. A new initiative announced in July in the London Connects newsletter for a London-wide system will potentially make it possible for someone living in Hackney to find information about consultations on community planning in their area, consultations affecting their children’s school in Islington and public transport near where they work in the City, all from any one of the London websites listed above.

Driving change
In technical terms, setting up such a system is now easy, but whether it will be adopted by local authorities is another matter. Central government has taken a lead with the Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) process, which encourages and, to some extent, requires local authorities to acquire such systems.

The need and the business case
Some regional partnership bodies like London Connects are playing a healthy role in championing these ideas and Partnership Manager Andres Crespo has endorsed the “e-consultation management system (eCMS)”. As he put it, “Innovative, cost-effective and efficient ways to carry out consultations are pivotal in capturing the lost voices of our 21-Century citizens. A common e-consultation system for the whole of London, such as the one proposed by CommunityPeople, is long overdue”.

The right prospective
But many council officers still remain sceptical about e-consultation as a concept. They see it as an add-on rather than a replacement for the traditional methods of consulting with the public. They often believe that it will create more work, because they find it hard to see what off-line work it could replace. Some officers even claim that e-consultation is expensive, although a quick look at the figures shows that this view can only be justified if e-consultation really is an additional expense rather than a replacement for off-line methods. For comparison, the London-wide eCMS system would cost a London Borough about the same for a whole year’s worth of consultations, as just one postal survey for a citizens’ panel.

Getting the mix right
The fact that over a third of the population still do not have access to the web, the so-called “digital divide”, is often quoted by the traditionalists as a reason for rejecting e-consultation completely. The implication seems to be that we must use the web for everything or for nothing, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that different media are appropriate to different kinds of people and so, for consultation, a mixture of online methods and traditional ones is probably the best way to go. Many older people will only feel comfortable with paper or come to meetings while most young people will only use the web.

Cost benefits
If making changes in local government practice is like wading through thick mud, the largest quagmire in terms of the adoption of e-consultation has to be budget setting. The traditional methods of market research such as on street surveys, public meetings and focus groups cost something whenever they are run. Double the amount of consultation and you double the cost. This means that budgets for consultation tend to be associated with projects, i.e. with the individual consultations, rather than being treated as infrastructure costs. But the main cost of e-consultation is in development and maintenance, not activity. So although the adoption of a new e-consultation management system might save a lot of money overall, whose budget is it going to come out of if the savings are from many separate budgets from many different departments? Don’t look at IT, they never had a budget for consultation in the first place!

Allocating the budget
The implementation of electronic methods in local democracy needs a shift in thinking at a high level, high enough to allow some restructuring of budgets. Departmental heads need some vision in this area.

Driving change
But perhaps overall, the rate at which I can realistically become an active citizen depends on one key group of people: the “e-government champions”. These are the people within each local authority given the task by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister of pushing through the various e-government initiatives. They are the chief head bangers with the job of banging together the heads of the council officers to get agreement on adoption of electronic methods.

At the end of the day
Most people probably don’t care whether it comes about through vision or banging of heads, or even whether it is called “active citizenship” or some other buzzword. They just want to have an influence on the decisions that affect them without too much sweat – and without too much delay please.

© Eric Sutherland http://www.ghostwriter.dsl.pipex.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Administration attorneys defended on Friday the part of President Barack Obama's healthcare law that expands the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled and said Congress has the power to set the terms under which it will disburse funds to the states.

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