~ With apologies for cross-posting ~ ECSCW'03 Workshop 7 ~ Monday 15 September, Helsinki, Finland ~ Call for Participation CSCW@E-Democracy: Supporting Conversation and Collaboration in Policy-making Conference website: http://ecscw2003.oulu.fi/ * Aims This one-day workshop aims to initiate a research forum to explore common ground between CSCW and e-democracy. Participants are invited to submit a short position paper (5 pages max.) on prior research or work in progress relevant to one or more of the themes outlined at the end of this call. Each of 3 workshop sessions will be led by experienced researchers and structured to encourage discussion. Workshop submissions should outline the nature of the author's proposed presentation, and will be peer reviewed. The workshop does not aim to arrive at a single consensus position, but to elaborate a limited cluster of themes relevant to the evaluation of e-democracy systems. We plan to publish the proceedings as a special issue in a major international journal and/or as a book. Submissions should be sent to a.whyte@napier.ac.uk by June 16, 2003. * Intended Participants (max. 16) Participants should have evaluation experience of e-democracy or related public fora such as civic networks and online communities. We hope to bring together different disciplines in addition to computer science, especially political science, sociology, and organisational science. * Topic The workshop focuses on tools and research approaches concerning the organisation of discourse or conversation, and in particular those that participants consider relevant to 'e-democracy' evaluation. For example the Zeno 'discourse support' platform has been adapted for applications in a number of relevant contexts (Gordon and Richter, 2002). We define e-democracy here as the use of network technologies to promote collaboration between actors for policy-making purposes, whether acting as citizens, their elected representatives, or on behalf of administrations, parliaments or opposition groups. The "W" in CSCW has in recent years breached the confines of the workplace to include other forms of collaborative activity in domestic and public arenas. Activities carried out in the name of democracy span each of these settings, and e-democracy systems are claimed to enhance them according to a logic that welds increasing Internet access and connectivity to increasing public participation in policy-making. Debate and speculation continues among political scientists, yet detailed empirical work remains rare. Descriptions of the fit between technology and practice that approach the richness of CSCW workplace studies are almost absent from e-democracy research. Nor are there many instances of innovation demonstrating the re-invigoration of democratic institutions and constituencies, or perhaps more accurately, there are no widely accepted methodologies to test such claims. The potential scope of e-democracy technology and methodology is wide. Many governments are actively experimenting with web applications that are intended to enhance public participation in policy-making, at local, national and international levels of government. These are often 'vertical' applications of generic tools. For example threaded discussion fora are being widely deployed by governments to inform policy, and by civic groups to articulate positions and influence agendas. Generic fora tools are embedded in policy information and guidance to pre-structure the conversations between citizen-users and moderators that purport to relate to this information and to a policy theme. Thus many applications structure discussion according to a policy-making life cycle model that begins with an agenda-setting phase, progresses through evidence gathering and analysis, followed by policy drafting, implementation and monitoring. The structure provided by e-democracy tools and their moderators/facilitators is almost invariably in pursuit of 'effective deliberation' and 'enhanced participation'. Collaborative discourse appears then to be an appropriate model or metaphor for e-democracy design. Yet little work has been done to validate e-democracy approaches against the perspectives and practices of the actors involved. What evidence is there of a 'fit' between approaches to structuring discourse and e-democracy contexts? To help initiate our discussion we propose the themes below. These may be redefined based on the workshop submissions, and used to structure the day's proceedings around 3 sessions. * Scaling up from 'the group' CSCW tools have largely been designed for 'the workgroup', framed in terms of roles, tasks, processes and/or practices. What is transferable from the 'traditional' CSCW methods of seeing and supporting work settings? How is e-democracy different? One connotation of e-democracy is of collaboration and conflict among large collectives. Yet few approaches to collaboration have seriously tackled how to structure online discussion so that large numbers (thousands) of participants can enjoy equal access, and maintain a coherent overview of the process. Visualisation is seen as key to success (Turoff et al, 1999), and interesting prototypes informed by Conversation Analysis have been described (e.g. Erikson et al, 2002). Collaborative filtering techniques employed to sustain 'online community' may also be relevant here. But is there empirical evidence of particular demands or constraints in applying these techniques, already used for community and intra-organisational needs, for e-democracy purposes? * Deliberation fora: Asymmetries and alternatives The threaded discussion forum has become a common denominator of governments rush to enhance citizen participation. But does the focus on deliberative models of participation promote asymmetries- 'double standards' for citizens and policy-makers? Citizen's comments are frequently moderated according to deliberation rules, then subject to post-hoc content analysis to assess the quality of deliberation (cf. Wilhelm, 1999). How are facilitators themselves made accountable? Can evaluation criteria and methods be considered 'democratic'? Are they applied equally to discussions among policy-makers themselves? The goal of informed deliberation has so infused e-democracy thinking (e.g. Coleman and Gøtze, 2001) that it is seldom questioned. Is there evidence that support for e-democracy 'deliberation' requires anything more (or less) than support for the turn-taking patterns of everyday conversation (Sacks et, al 1974)? Does deliberation place an onus on citizens to 'be informed' about official rationalisations for policy? The notion of testimony has been proposed as an alternative criterion for democratic participation (Sanders, 1997), and emphasises the communication to representatives of citizens versions of policy needs and effects, grounded in personal and collective experience. How do these approaches to political communication and other alternatives translate into workable e-democracy design and evaluation criteria? The policy-making cycle: grounding e-democracy in democratic practice? Policy-making may be seen as a cyclic process, beginning with agenda setting, ending with policy monitoring, and encompassing stakeholders' dialogue throughout. Yet despite the number of government online consultations of citizens (or 'e-rulemaking') there is little evidence of a good 'fit' to practice. A pay-off in greater transparency appears an elusive goal rather than a reality. More evident, or perhaps just more newsworthy, are dramatic political changes engendered by mass protests; publicised by broadcast media but apparently initiated and amplified by ad-hoc groups using messaging technologies (Rheingold, 2002). Is the net effect of 'e-participation' greater when initiated outside the policy-making loop by 'self-organising' networks of civic groups? Can new paradigms of network organisation be accommodated within systems run by and for governments? Are process modelling approaches rich enough to provide a 'fit' with democratic practice? If categories 'have politics' (Suchman, 1994), are they any more evident when democratic processes are re-engineered in order to render them computable? Workshop organisers: - Fiorella di Cindio, Computer Science Department, University of Milan - Elisabeth Davenport, Social Informatics Group, School of Computing, Napier University. - Judith Gregory, Institute for Informatics, University of Oslo - Peter Mambrey, Dept. of CSCW, Fraunhofer Inst.for Applied Information Technology FhG-FIT - Volkmar Pipek, International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn - Angus Whyte, International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier University. References Coleman, Stephen and Gøtze, John (2001) Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation online at: http://www.bowlingtogether.net/intro.html Erickson, T., Halverson, C., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M. and Wolf, T. (2002) "Social Translucence: Designing Social Infrastructures that Make Collective Activity Visible." Communications of the ACM (Special issue on Community, ed. J. Preece), Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 40-44, 2002. Gordon, Thomas F., and Gernot Richter (2002) "Discourse Support Systems for Deliberative Democracy." eGovernment: State of the Art and Perspectives (EGOV02). Eds. Roland Traunmüller and Klaus Lenk. Aix-en-Provence: Springer Verlag, 2002. 248-55. Rheingold, Howard (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Perseus Book Group, Cambridge, MA. Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, G. Jefferson (1974) 'A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation' Language 50(4), 1974, pp. 696-735 Sanders, Lynn (1997) 'Against Deliberation' Political Theory 25(3), 1997, pp. 347-384 Suchman, Lucy (1994). Do Categories Have Politics? The Language /Action Perspective Reconsidered. Proceedings CSCW'94, 2(3):177--190. Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., Bieber, M., Fjermestad, J., & Rana, A. (1999). Collaborative discourse structures in computer mediated group communications. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 4(4). Wilhelm, A., 'Virtual sounding boards: how deliberative is online political discussion?' in: Hague, B. and Loader, B. (eds.), Digital Democracy. Discourse and decision making in the information age. pp. 154-177 Routledge, London, 1999 Dr Angus Whyte, Research Fellow International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier University 10 Colinton Rd Edinburgh EH10 5DT, U.K. a.whyte@napier.ac.uk www.teledemocracy.org +44 131 455 2544