eGovBlog – The Future of Governments – eGovernment Blog & News

Based on a number of statements from the major Republican and Democratic candidates addressing several election topics like, taxes, abortion or the war in Iraq, VoteMatch helps you determine who is the candidate you agree with most.

Participants have to answer the statements, by clicking on ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ or ‘don’t know’. You can then add extra weight to the themes considered more relevant to your choice.

The Dutch Institute for Public and Politics (IPP) is behind the initiative.

Try the tool yourself and have fun, by clicking here.

The co-founder of Google answers in this one minute video a question about voting and what they could do to improve it.

You can hear his views here.

Google, the internet giant, is now trying to expand its domains to the political arena.

It has recently launched Google Checkout for Political Contributions as a tool to start accepting political contributions from supporters and increase online giving to campaigns by charging credit or debit cards.

Google Checkout enables candidates to raise funds through YouTube You Choose ’08 channel and allows supporters to embed contribution buttons on their blogs, websites and social network profiles.

Very cool feature.
Read More

If you are one of those who follow in someway the web 2.0 phenomenon, then you have heard about Techcrunch, one of the top weblogs dedicated to profiling new Internet products and companies in the Valley.

Being an icon of the web 2.0, it is very interesting the fact that they have decided to put an eye on the US 2008 presidential process, launching the ‘Tech President Primaries’.

The goal of this initiative is to hold their own political primaries online. Techcrunch will endorse one candidate from each the Democratic and th … Continue Reading

The event, Empowering Citizens through Technology and Participation, will take place on 28th and 29th 2008 in the Congress Centre in London.

Key partners for the Synmposium include the International Centre for Local eDemocracy (ICELE), United Nations (UN) and the Council of Europe (CoE).

The sessions scheduled for the event comprise:’Getting Together Online’, ‘Community Empowerment using Technology’, ‘Participatory Budgeting’ and ‘Web 2.0: Should elections stay “stationary”‘?.

You can find more information about the gathering in this link.

We are yet in the very early stages of internet politics development. But there are already some pioneers who are very actively experimenting with the potential of the web 2.0 to interact with voters.

Ron Paul, the Republican US presidential candidate, is a major example of this new trend. He has been targeting a comprehensive blend of social networking sites, photo feeds, video channels and other cool networks to reach his constituents.

There is a group with more than 65,000 supporters on Facebook; the candidate also has presence in other well known … Continue Reading

We present today a very interesting work on citizen centric e-Government. The project represents the cumlination of a 18 month research to identify what works and what doesn’t across Europe in this field.

The initiative was commissioned to ECOTEC Research & Consulting and the Tavistock Institute by the by the e-Government unit, DG Information Society and Media of the European Commission.

You can read the entire paper here.