Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

EDem10 focuses on these changes which can be seen occurring in different areas and which are manifest in different way:

• Transparency & Communication (freedom of information, free information access, openness, information sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks, data visualization, eLearning, empowering, …);
• Participation & Collaboration (innovation malls, innovation communities, bottom up, top down, social networks, engagement and accountability, collaborative culture, collaboration between C2C, G2C, …);
• Architecture, Concepts & Effects (access and openness, user generated content, peer production, network effects, power laws, long tail, harnessing the power of the crowd, crowd sourcing, social web, semantic web, …);
• Different Fields : open government initiatives, eDemocracy, eParticipation, eVoting, eDeliberation;
• Approaches and Disciplines : law & legal studies, social sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, psychology, sociology, applied computer gaming and simulation, democratic theory, media and communication sciences;
• Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches;
• Research Methods.

I realise that some of the rhetoric behind e-government and e-democracy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (and frankly, my eyes glaze over every time I hear someone singing the praises of electronic voting systems), but happily, EDEM is organised as a very broad church which is very deliberately focussed around e-democracy overall (importantly, also including activities in the NGO sector) rather than simply around e-government or e-governance. Do consider putting in a paper - submissions close on 21 December 2009.

Technorati : CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media
Del.icio.us : CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media