From: Dan Jellinek [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 30 September 2008 11:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: E-Government Bulletin, 30 September 2008: Participatory budgeting - astonishing results; web accessibility guidelines update.
+++E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN
- ISSUE 273, 30 September 2008.
- A Headstar Publication
http://www.headstar.com .
IN THIS ISSUE: Participatory budgeting - astonishing results; web accessibility guidelines update.
Please forward this free service to others so they can subscribe - full details at the end. We never pass on email addresses.
++Special Notice: E-Democracy '08
- Top Level Speakers Confirmed
http://www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08/ .
The UK's biggest and best annual conference on 'E-Democracy' is back for a fourth year, with a range of unmissable speakers.
Confirmed presenters include Mark Byford, Deputy Director-General of the BBC; Rolf Luhrs, Project Co-Ordinator for PEP-NET.eu; Suzy Hall, National Campaign Co-ordinator, Unfairpak; Bethan Jenkins, Member of the Welsh Assembly; Andy Williamson, head of the digital government programme at the Hansard Society; James Crabtree, Trustee, UK Citizens Online Democracy; and Tom Steinberg, founder of MySociety.org. Partners and supporters include the Hansard Society, Cisco and the London Borough of Redbridge.
Plenary sessions, networking and lively workshops combine to create the buzz that always surrounds this event. Anyone with an interest in connecting with communities; consultation; or campaigning in any context should register.
Fees are £165 + VAT for public and voluntary sector and £215 +VAT for private sector:
http://www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08/
[Special notice ends]
++Issue 273 Contents.
01: Budget Vote 'Most Successful E-Participation Of All Time'
- Brazilian city uses internet to engage 10 per cent of electors
02: Overdue Web Accessibility Guidelines Set For December.
- Standards consortium confirms publication target.
03: Link Between Interactive Gaming And Civic Engagement
- US report examines teenagers' interactive habits.
News In Brief: 04: Passport Checks - electronic document security;
05: Child Benefit - free laptop vouchers; 06: Society News - Socitm to expand membership.]
Section Two: Focus - Participatory Budgeting.
07: Who Wants To Spend A Million Dollars? Tiago Peixoto and Dan Jellinek report on a ground-breaking project in Brazil which has used the internet to engage local people in public spending decisions - with astonishing results.
[Contents ends]
++Special Notice: Techno-Footprint: ICT and Sustainability in the
Public Sector
27th November 2008, New Connaught Rooms, London Early bird price until 17 October http://www.headstar-events.com/techno08/
The Cabinet Office's 'Greening Government IT' paper sets a deadline of January 2009 for central government to address the impact on carbon emissions of all new ICT procurement. Local government has its own targets to hit. Is you organisation shaping up?
Headstar's second annual conference and exhibition on ICT and Sustainability in the Public Sector is a must-attend event for everyone involved in all public sector services with an IT element, including desktop computers. Our conference will offer practical advice on reducing your IT footprint.
We are offering a fantastic line-up including Caroline Lucas MEP, recently elected as the first ever leader of the Green Party; Catalina McGregor from the Ministry of Defence, a department spearheading environmental activity in IT; and Chris Head from Socitm Insight, one of the UK's leading analysts in the field.
Registration normally costs £295 + VAT for public sector workers and
£395 + VAT for private sector, but register before 17 Oct for a £100
reduction:
http://www.headstar-events.com/techno08/
[Special notice ends].
++Section One: News.
+01: Budget Vote 'Most Successful E-Participation Of All Time'.
A Brazilian project using the internet to involve residents of a city in public service spending decisions is the most successful e-participation project of all time, the author of a new paper on the project claims.
Brazil is the birthplace of 'participatory budgeting', which has been running there in the city of Belo Horizonte since 1993.
The city has a population of just under 2.5 million, of whom 1.7 million are electors, and some 10 per cent of all electors took part in its 'ePB' (electronic participatory budgeting) programme launched in 2006.
Writing in E-Government Bulletin (see section two, this issue) Tiago Peixoto, a research associate at the University of Zurich e-Democracy Centre, says the project represents the highest level of participation ever seen in a Participatory Budgeting programme, making it "one of the most significant initiatives in the world in the domain of e- democracy to have been implemented so far."
In a new paper on the project published this month, Peixoto says a fund of US$11 million was allocated to the initiative, with citizens voting exclusively online to allocate the money to one out of four public works in each of the nine districts of the city. For example, in the medium-sized district of Barreiro, voters chose to build a new sports complex instead of either a new library; renewal of a main street; or regeneration of the commercial centre.
The e-PB project was heavily promoted by the city's administration, and included interactive online discussion forums. The results were
dramatic: some 10 per cent of eligible voters - more than 170,000 people took part, compared with less than 2% for traditional PB methods.
NOTE: For a full report on the project including a link to Peixoto's paper see section two, this issue.
+02: Overdue Web Accessibility Guidelines Set For December.
A long-awaited updated version of the main international standard for making websites accessible to people with disabilities is set to be published in mid-December, E-Government Bulletin has learned.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C - http://www.w3c.org) have been in development for several years.
Creators of public sector websites have been using version 1.0 of the guidelines, adherence to which is written into various government guidelines. However they have long been seen as over-technical and complex and unclear in many situations.
Version 2.0 is set to address many of these problems by moving away from rigid technical 'checkpoints' to more flexible 'success criteria.'
This week, the responsible World Wide Web consortium working group is due to meet in Boston, US to finalise the current 'Candidate recommendation' phase of WCAG 2.0 in which the new guidelines have been tested on real web sites to confirm their applicability.
The group will debate which success criteria can be considered sufficiently stable to be implemented, and some of the requirements previously marked as 'At risk' will be reviewed to ensure the guidelines can be met in practice.
A W3C spokesman told E-Government Bulletin this week that publication before Christmas was now expected, and that if the deadline did slip any further it would be a matter of weeks, not months.
+03: Link Between Interactive Gaming And Civic Engagement.
Teenagers who play computer games involving interaction with others are more likely to be interested in politics or civically engaged, a US report has found.
The report, 'Teens, video games and civics, is published by Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit organisation which researches people's online habits (
http://fastlink.headstar.com/pew3 ).
It finds that gaming is often a social experience for teenagers, more than three-quarters of whom play games which involvement interaction with others. Some 65 per cent of them play with people who are in the room with them at the time and 24 per cent play with people they connect with online.
Those who play games with other people in the room tend to be more politically or civically engaged, the research finds. Those who play games online are more likely to visit and contribute to game related websites, and young people who contribute to discussion boards on such sites tend to be more civically and politically engaged, it finds.
More than 1,100 teenagers took part in the survey.
++News In Brief:
+04: Passport Checks: A Prague conference held to test the security of
a new generation of European electronic passports (see also EGB issue 172, September 2008) has been completed with mostly positive results.
The majority of passports showed no errors, with a handful of negative results or warnings requiring further compatibility tests:
http://fastlink.headstar.com/pass1 .
+05: Child Benefit: Free laptops and broadband access will be
provided to children from low income families under a new voucher scheme announced by the government. The scheme builds on the work of the Home Access Taskforce whose report was published in July (
http://fastlink.headstar.com/becta2 ). It will be piloted by two local authorities in early 2009 before being rolled out across England in the
autumn:
http://fastlink.headstar.com/laptop1 .
+06: Society News: The local government Society of Information
Technology Management (Socitm) has signed a three-way partnership agreement with web software providers Esteiro Business Solutions and Jadu to help overhaul its online services for members. The move comes in advance of an extraordinary general meeting in Newport next month where the society will vote on a plan to expand its membership and services into other parts of the public sector:
http://www.socitm.gov.uk .
[Section One ends].
++Sponsored Notice: Opinion Suite
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To find out more, visit
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[Sponsored notice ends].
++Section Two: Focus
- Participatory Budgeting.
+07: Who Wants To Spend A Million Dollars?
by Tiago Peixoto and Dan Jellinek.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a buzz-word in policy circles. The UK's first national conference on the topic was held recently by the charity Participatory Budgeting Unit (http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk), which describes PB as the involvement of local people in decision-making about the spending of a defined public service budget.
There are PB projects now running all over the globe, but the birthplace of the idea is Brazil, where a ground-breaking project District Participatory Budgeting programme has been running in the city of Belo Horizonte since 1993.
This month, a paper on the Belo Horizonte programme was published by Tiago Peixoto, a research associate at the University of Zurich e- Democracy Centre, and the remainder of this article draws largely from that paper.
Belo Horizonte is the capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, with a population of just under 2.5 million, of whom 1.7 million are electors. Following the introduction of district PB in 1993, a further Housing Participatory Budgeting (HPB) project was also launched in
1996 to help address an increasing demand for housing in the city. In both the district and housing PB processes, a series of assemblies are held enabling citizens to allocate budgetary resources and scrutinise public spending.
Every two years, the city administration and community leaders invite citizens to the official opening of the PB and to the district rounds in each of the city's nine districts.
During this first round, the administration distributes a form to neighbourhood representatives to be filled in with citizens' requests for public works. The representatives in turn call community meetings to establish what the priority public work is for their area. The feasibility of each demand is then technically assessed by the administration.
The administration presents the budget available to each sub-district, which is proportional to a sub-district's population size and inversely proportional to its quality of life index. The sub-district forums pre- select a maximum of 25 public works for each district, and tours are organised during which the sub-district delegates visit the sites of these works to gain a better understanding of them.
The District Forum is the last deliberative stage of the PB, where the city administration indicates the estimated costs of each of the 25 pre- selected works. Based on these indications and on what the sub-district delegates consider to be priorities, they choose a maximum of 14 works. During this forum the sub-district delegates also elect the district delegates that will follow-up and oversee the execution of the public works. The final stage is the Municipal Meeting of Budgetary Priorities, where the elected delegates present to the mayor the public works selected by the PB to be executed by the administration.
In 2006, alongside the regular PB process explained above, the city administration launched a system of Digital Participatory Budgeting (e-PB). Independent of the budget of US$43 million allocated for the traditional PB, a fund of US$11 million was allocated to the new initiative.
The e-PB consists of a scheme where citizens registered as electors in Belo Horizonte, independent of their place of residency in the city, vote exclusively online for one out of four public works for each of the nine districts of the city. The initiative had three main goals: to modernise the participatory budgeting process through the use of ICTs; to increase citizens' participation in the process; and to broaden the scope of public works that are submitted to voting (for a Brazilian language site on the project see http://opdigital.pbh.gov.br/ ).
Traditionally, the level of public participation in PB processes had been very low, composed in general of citizens of an advanced age and of lower socio-economic background; in the previous four years only 1.46% of the population participated in the second round of the process. The internet was seen as a way of making it easier for citizens to take part, reducing the time and cost of participation; the traditional PB required citizens to attend meetings at a certain time and place, with the e-PB citizens were free to vote online within a period of 42 days.
For the e-PB, four public works per district was subject to online voting with the aim of selecting one work per district. Citizens over 16 years old were able to vote through an e-voting platform on the city's website.
In general, the works selected for online voting were much larger than the public works put forward by the traditional PB process. As an example, in the medium-sized district of Barreiro, four choices were offered to voters: to build a new public sports complex; to build a new library; to renew one of the area's main streets; or to regenerate the district's commercial centre. Each project was costed at 11million US
Dollars: and the sports complex won the vote. This is not a process to be taken lightly, since the other three projects did not go ahead.
The e-PB was heavily promoted and the website provided detailed information on the proposed works that were to be selected. Further information could be obtained by email, and a designated address was set up to respond to queries. The online platform of the e-PB offered possibilities for multilateral interactivity and, consequently, facilitated deliberative action.
Participation was opened to all citizens, with a discussion forum including nine different threads, one for each district. Even though active participation in the forum was low, reaching a total of 1,210 posts, all posts could be seen without logging in by all of those who accessed the link to the forums, and the number of readers was significantly higher than the number of posts.
The total number of votes was 503,266 with a total number of 172,938 voters. The difference between the number of voters and number of votes is accounted for by the fact that voters were allowed to vote nine times as long as they voted for only one work per district. These numbers therefore correspond to a participation level of around 10 per cent of electors, nearly seven times more participants than the traditional participatory budgeting.
This is, without a doubt, the highest level of participation ever seen in a Participatory Budgeting programme anywhere in the world; and indeed is surely one of the most significant e-democracy exercises ever conducted.
NOTE: Tiago's Peixoto's working paper on Belo Horizonte's DPB programme can be found at:
http://edc.unige.ch/edcadmin/images/Tiago.pdf
[Section Two ends].
++END NOTES.
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ISSN 1476-6310
+PERSONNEL
Editor: Dan Jellinek.
Reporter: Majeed Saleh.
Associate Editors - Derek Parkinson, Mel Poluck.
Head of Marketing and Sales: Claire Clinton.
[Issue 273 ends].
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