E-Democracy and Encouraging Civic Participation [via Collaborative Software Community Group]

Introduction

I would like to broach some topics pertaining to the advancement of technology,
political participation and civic engagement.

I recently wrote to the American Philosophical Association, to a number of
political scientists and to colleagues at technology organizations, presenting
to them that technologies to strengthen and expand democratic participation,
technologies facilitating city-scale e-democratic processes, are expected to
emerge from capitalist forces. I presented that citizens are proficient in the
uses of collaboration software from workplaces and can be well-informed about
its applicability to e-democratic processes.

We can think ahead and can explore new practical theory to ensure the quality of
city-scale e-democratic endeavors.

Collaboration Software

Collaboration software enhances the performance and productivity of arbitrarily
large organizations. Users of collaboration software can envision and discuss
its applicability to e-democratic processes and its facilitation of civic
participation in the performance of some of the ordinary processes of city
governance.

E-democratic models are myriad and include group processes which result in
recommendations to mayors, city councils, city council committees or
bureaucracies. Topics pertaining to collaboration software for e-democracy
scenarios include the dynamics of self-organization, of task structures and of
accessing vast information resources. Routing information and deliverables
between groups, across sectors, is also a component of e-democratic processes.

Public sector employees at the offices of mayors, of city councilpersons, of
bureaucracies and of other public sector organizations can utilize collaboration
software interoperable with public e-democracy spaces as 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
participants of city-scale e-democracies. Technology can facilitate
interoperation between the public sector and the public. Some public sector
reports or documents can be components of broader groups' scenarios and some
public processes, documents or deliverables can be components of public sector
scenarios.

Software such as Office Graph can ensure that relevant, fresh, information and
documents are available to users including based upon their multiple
simultaneous interests, tasks, groups or roles. Items that can be routed include
documents, multimedia and data. Office Graph utilizes sophisticated machine
learning algorithms to connect people to the relevant content, conversations and
people around them. The metadata of workflows, of structured processes and steps
of processes, of groups and subgroups, of tasks and subtasks, of topics and
subtopics can be of use to algorithms for ascertaining contextual, task-based
relevance to route and to present information to individuals.

Incentivization and Acknowledgement of Civic Participation through Social Media

Participation in democratic processes is time-consuming, potentially requiring
hours per week or month, involves reading documents, viewing multimedia and
participating in group discussions. Some might describe civic participation as
volunteer work after 5 p.m.

Social media platforms can strengthen and expand e-democratic processes. Cities
can utilize incentivization and validation systems such as integration with
professional social networking websites (i.e. LinkedIn) to indicate and to
acknowledge excellence of civic participation. New portions of professional
social network profiles can be envisioned for civic participation. It could be
as easy for users as selecting a checkbox, authenticating across services and
configuring the connection between services to synchronize portions of their
professional social networking profiles to showcase their accumulating accolades
from civic participation. Social media platforms can connect to and synchronize
with the collaboration software infrastructures of cities or systems that
interconnect the infrastructures of multiple cities to convenience citizens as
they move between cities.

Conclusion

There is some work to do. Alongside the New America Foundation, the GovLab at
the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Sunlight Foundation, the Knight
Foundation, the United States Conference of Mayors and its Technology and
Innovation Taskforce, I would like to invite each of you to continue to
strengthen and expand e-democratic processes and to commence research into new
technology, new uses of existing business and collaboration software, and new
uses of professional social media websites for e-democracy and encouraging civic
participation.



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'E-Democracy and Encouraging Civic Participation'

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Received on Monday, 19 October 2015 09:03:57 UTC