We are pleased to inform you that the Association For Societal Participation has officially been registered by the court in Budapest, Hungary. We are currently working on building the international network and applying for grants to establish a firmer financial basis for the association. New members and volunteers are of course always welcome!

Also, since our last update, we have built a new website for Civilzone. We hope that this will shed more light on the Civilzone project and that it makes our goals clearer. If you have any comments on the new text and design, please do not hesitate to share it with us. Participy.org will remain active as well, functioning as our blog. We hope to see you again in the future at both websites!

This July, the European Commission published its 2013 Work Programme for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). In chapter 7.5 they are addressing health, ageing well, and inclusion and governance. They wish to improve  and manage personal life, aiming for productivity gains, higher customer satisfaction and harnessing the network effect for better provision of the public interest. The sections that interest us the most though are the ones about governance and policy modelling and collective awareness platforms for social innovation.

The European Commission is focusing on the topics because the public sector has a significant role in stimulating economic growth, as has been evident from the current economic and financial crisis. At the same time, citizens and in particular the younger generation are becoming more vocal in monitoring and influencing policy decisions. Current ICT tools for collaborative governance and policy modeling show great opportunities for empowerment of citizens and increased transparency in decision-making. In addition, there is a growing need for research and innovation for future public services that will be a catalyst for growth and sustainability.

As Anthony Zacharzewski announced on the 19th of September, The Democratic Society has launched a new discussion space on Open Policymaking, because on the 19th of June, the UK Government’s Civil Service Reform Plan made a commitment to that. This will become the default, but what open policymaking actually means in practice is still not entirely clear. Questions include:

• when does “policymaking” happen – is it just when a specific decision is being taken, or is it a continuous process?
• what open policymaking is happening now, and what lessons can we learn from the UK and beyond?
• how can we balance open policymaking and the role of a democratically accountable decision-maker?
• what sorts of different tools to do you need for involving people in different ways and at different stages?
• how can you ensure that policymakers are hearing a representative set of opinions?
• what does open policymaking mean in local government, the NHS, and organisations delivering and designing services at local level?

The Democratic Society are planning to cooperate with the Cabinet in answering these questions, and they would like to involve others in the process – citizens, organizations, universities, businesses etc. Everyone can join the discussion on their blog or through Twitter and Facebook.

After a look at the USA & the UK, it is now time to have a look at the social media scene in Australia, too. I’m posting two short segments, one about Facebook and one about Twitter here.

The following blogpost was taken from Howard, A. 2012. Connecting with Communities: How Local Government Is Using Social Media to Engage with Citizens. ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra and Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government. I very much recommend reading the whole paper for those interested.

Are there similar examples for use of social media in your area, too?

This article was published on BBC News, UK Politics yesterday. After a look into the United States in the previous post, we can see that in the UK they are also trying to utilize the many possibilities given by the internet, or more precisely, social media. WeGov is a project worth paying attention to, we will definitely be blogging more about it in the future.

By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News

Why bother having elections and votes in Parliament, when you can find out what the people want in real time, 24 hours a day, on social media?

No-one is seriously suggesting that the keys to Downing Street should be handed over to Facebook users. Or that the prime minister should be replaced by a Twitter feed, however tempting that might seem to some.

But the weird, and slightly scary, fact is that after years of overly-optimistic predictions about e-democracy, social media is now so freely available and widespread that it would probably work. In theory.

“Technologically it is now possible. We could function as a direct democracy,” Labour MP Kevin Brennan told a Hansard Society event at Westminster.

There are countless projects running and organizations working currently in the field of e-democracy and e-participation. CNN’s and Facebook’s collaboration is another interesting one, which also indicates that more and more people realize the possibility, what is more, the importance of taking political opinion forming and discussion to the internet. Our application aims to do much more than the ‘I’m Voting’ app, but still we can learn from this example as well. You can read about the app in this blogpost, as The Next Web reported it a few weeks ago.