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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
[log in to unmask] 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

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