Some of the forum topics comprise ‘Strategies for Integrated eGovernment’, ‘Securing eGovernment services’, ‘Application Integration for Successful eGovernment Initiatives’ and ‘The creation of secure and reliable online identity and reachability to eGovernment services’.

Featured speakers include Mr. Mohammed Ali AlQaed CEO, eGovernment Agency, Kingdom Of Bahrain; Ms Haiyan Qian, Director of the Division for Public Administration & Development Management; and Christian Rupp, Federal Executive Secretary E-Government Austria.

For more information, visit forum’s website here.

The site is set to include information about the evolution of the Act, together with tools to help citizens hold the government accountable.

One of the most relevant aspects of the website has to do with transparency and accountability, something especially relevant these days. There is also a section where people can share their story, and how the Act is affecting them.

The idea is to create a new system of representation in government, one that relies on the new digital technologies.

This is how it works. There is an Internet based forum, where citizens are invited to debate all issues relating to their lives. Issues in the forum have been broken down by government department.

Based on the debates that take place, a weekly list of tasks and objectives is set to be proposed. Finally, once additional feedback from the people is incorporated, a questionnaire will be put to those elegible to vote. The outcome of that vote will create a mandate for United Minds.

A mandate for what?. Well, the second part of the story, is that Ross O’Mullane will be running for a seat in the Irish Parliament, Dail Eireann. If elected as member of the parlament, his mandate will be to follow the opinion and vote of the United Mind’s followers.

This is a great approach to a very direct-democracy, and I am eager to see how things move forward.

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In order to make it easier for participants, authorities have divided the forty seven deserving parks into five London sub-regions. For each of those sub-regions, the two parks that get the most votes will be the winners.

Voting ends on January 30th, and londoners have three main ways for voting: through an online form on the web, by post, or by mobile phone. In this case, the user must enter the word ‘parks’ and her full London post code. That will automatically trigger a vote for the nearest park to that post code on the shortlist.

This type of issues certainly belong to the participatory budgeting domain. And this is a good avenue to move forward the concept of a more direct democracy in the years to come.

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The paper is only available in norwegian unfortunately, and among other things it highlights aspects like the enormous possibilities for dialogue and distribution of information, if the government and the users of web communities cooperate.

The recommendations made by the researchers imply ‘that public information should be made freely available and reusable, and that public institutions to a larger extent must be willing to experiment and take risks’.

For those who either understand, or at least are eager to practice norwegian, click here to access the report

Each Senator that is elected through the SOL party has a commitment to directly follow the citizens’ wishes on each piece of legislation. In order to make this real, all the australian citizens can vote for or against a given legislation in the party’s website. Each of the SOL senators will then vote in the Senate following the results of the citizen’s vote.

The founder of Senator On-Line, Berge Der Sarkissian in an interview about the initiative months ago said:’The internet is becoming the most powerful democratic tool. We are just for the voice of the majority to be represented in parliament. It’s not  a traditional party per se. We stand for people to be easily informed’.

The Australian Electoral Commission already approved Senator On-Line.

This is an extremely interesting initiative. We will follow it’s evolution.

The gathering, is organised by the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Information Society and Media.The three days event will bring together researchers and innovators, policy and business decision-makers working in the field of digital technologies.

Around 4000 delegates are expected.Among the different activities, there two sessions are expected for people to meet with other researchers, innovators and engineers working in the Governance and Policy modelling domains.

Within the Conference programme, one of the themes is referred to the impact through policy, that will ‘focus on effective public policies to stimulate ICT research and innovation for growth and sustainable development’.
In order to get more information about this major event, please click here.

eGB: Mr. Legale, what are the main topics that will be addressed by this year’s edition of the Forum?

EL: The American net-campaign will be one of the top interesting session, of course. Because European people are really excited by what happen is US during this incredible campaign. Phil Noble will chair a special session on this “first campaign of the 21st century” with representatives from Democrats and Republicans. As special guest, he has invited Andrew Rasiej, one of the best American specialists, founder of TechPresident.com and of the “Personal Democracy Forum”.

But we will speak also about the main challenges of the information society: How to reduce concretely the digital divide? How to offer the most efficient public service to citizens? How to involve citizens themselves in the process with the web 2.0? How to protect citizens in respect of their private life? What are the new services suggested by wireless technologies?

eGB: Given your experience with the Forum, who would you say ‘should’ attend to this event?

EL: Every citizen interested by the future of democracy should be interested by the debates of the World eDemocracy Forum. What we try to do is to allow people (citizens, specialists, private sector, NGOs, politicians, journalists, etc.) to share their experiences, their questions, their doubts. Everywhere in the world, we are asking the same question: how to live better and safer? Don’t reinvent the wheel, we have just to ask to our colleagues around the world. For example, the World eDemocracy Forum is also the place where a lot of European projects members are coming, just for networking because it is the place where you can meet people sharing the same idea than you: the world is changing thanks to technologies and we are contributing for a part of it.

eGB: Can you comment on the Trophy Ceremony of e-Democracy that is scheduled for day 2?

EL: If a lot of experiences exists around the world, they are not enough known by the population. With the eDemocracy Awards, we want to underline people, websites, organizations who do something. We have four categories: the International Award, with PoliticsOnline, the European Award with Politech Institute, the French Award with the “Club de l’Hyper République” and the Forum Award.

eGB: We have learned that delegates attending the Forum will be invited to take part in a supplementary Workshop on secure electronic document exchange for administrations. Can you give us a few words on that?

EL: Because the World eDemocracy Award is the place where eDemocracy and eGovernment specialists are coming, some organizations asked me to have a parallel session during the Forum or, because we don’t have place enough, before or after the Forum. The day before, on Wednesday October 15th, e-Forum, a not-for-profit Association that brings together all interested parties active in the field of eGovernment in Europe, from both the private and public sectors, will organize a workshop open to everyone. In the same time, the Politech Institute will organize also a workshop on eParticipation.

eGB: In which way would you say that this edition of the World E-Democracy Forum is something unique for practitioners and other stakeholders?

EL:I don’t know if the World eDemocracy Forum is unique because I know a lot of others conferences very interesting. But I think that you can meet in Paris the main specialists of eDemocracy and eGovernment in the same place and in a special environment (the gala dinner on board a boat to discover Paris by night is a very appreciated memory!).

eGB: Finally, how can interested people register or get more information about the Forum?

EL: The best is to visit the official website: www.edemocracy-forum.com to have more information and to register online. The Forum is free except for companies.