Re: E-Democracy and Encouraging Civic Participation

Dear M. Adam Sobieski,

Where do I start? :-) Any task open at the current time that you would like
to put me on?

Warm Regards,

-Joseph.

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 10:00 PM, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Open Government 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*
> <https://www.newamerica.org/>, the *GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of
> Engineering* <http://thegovlab.org/>, the *Sunlight Foundation*
> <http://sunlightfoundation.com/>, the *Knight Foundation*
> <http://knightfoundation.org/>, the *United States Conference of Mayors*
> <http://usmayors.org/> and its *Technology and Innovation Taskforce*
> <http://usmayors.org/innovation/>, 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.
>
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Adam Sobieski
> *http://www.phoster.com* <http://www.phoster.com/>
> *https://www.w3.org/community/collaboration/*
> <https://www.w3.org/community/collaboration/>
>
>
>
>