e-Democracy Comes to Vienna, myHeimat Goes to Cardiff
You’ll remember that at the time I had a few things to say on Gatewatching.org about last December’s government consultation blog trial by the Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) last year - and a quote from my blog post back then even made it into the federal government’s report discussing the “Digital Economy” blog and other participatory initiatives - while a little earlier and before taking on his current position at the University of Wollongong, Jason was involved in developing GetUp!’s Project Democracy site which provides a social media platform enabling users to track the work of Australia’s federal senators.
Jason and I have now joined forces for a paper I’ll present at the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy in Vienna; titled “Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective”, we’re discussing the various approaches (top-down, bottom-up) to citizen consultation which are evident in these examples as well as in more general attempts by politicians to use the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies to engage with constituents. In advance of the conference, I’ve now posted up the paper and Powerpoint over at snurb.info.
On the same trip next week, I’ll also travel to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff (no affiliation with the MEAA’s Future of Journalism events last year, which I didn’t find hugely enlightening); here, I’ll present a paper drawn from the interviews with the principals of the German hyperlocal citizen journalism site myHeimat.de which I conducted in Germany last October. (You may remember my previous post about myHeimat, a site which has since also won a European Newspaper Award for innovation.) The myHeimat Powerpoint and paper, as well as another one for a paper on produsage at the Transforming Audiences conference in London, are also online at snurb.info now. Any comments very much appreciated!
Recent Comments