Next Steps on the Road to Influencing European Governments

Featured. Posting written by Paul Johnston over 3 years ago.
Last comment over 3 years ago, 2 Comments.

A group of us are drafting a manifesto on open and transparent government which we will encourage European governments to adopt at the Ministerial egovernment conference in Malmo on Nov 21 and 22. The idea (now) is to draft a short manifesto on mixedink, supplement it with a more detailed document generated via a wiki and then use Facebook or some other mechanism to secure endorsement of the manifesto from as many people as possible. If you want to help us draft the manifesto, please contribute via http://mixedink.com/Eups20/Transparentgovernment

For more information on this initiative, see http://eups20.wordpress.com/

Comments

Wot__medium pnash

A few thoughts as a place holder and starter for 10. I'm thinking about this one and will probably contribute but right now I'm thinking "Is this the best way?"

There's another example of a manifestor here:

http://digitalengagement.org/2009/07/06/digital-engagement-manifesto-tell-us-what-you-think/

Which Helen Milner is putting together with a view to influencing the British Government's approach to how ICTs tackle social inclusion. It's an area I'm very involved in as an adviser to Local strategic Partnerships in England on how they can implement digital inclusion policies in their Local Area Agreements.

I'm also currently developing a European Project as part of the Polciy Support Programme to establish a Type B pilot to see how social media can engage citizens in European Policy and to try and influence it. Like all EU funding it's a bit speculative but who knows.

My point is that unless it's got the backing of a couple of Nobel prize winners I'm not sure that a manifesto is the way - that doesn't mean we shouldn't write manifestos, the process is a good one for focussing and refining thoughts.

My other issue with a manifesto that promotes social media as a means of decision making is that it favours the "netarati", which in itself is a moot point. Are we assuming that the ranks of the nerarati will swell to be all inclusive, or do we assume that the netarati will be no worse a means to influence policy than the mechanisms we have now?

So I'll think some more.

posted over 3 years ago

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

I am fairly pragmatic about both the issues you raise. Manifestos are not the answer to life, but if they can help move things forward, why not? Similarly, it is true that this sort of way of trying to have an impact limits things to tne netarati, but there are a helluva lot of other people influencing things who are not the poor and the downtroden, so us trying to have an impact probably broadens things slightly and also (hopefully) pushes in positive directions. I would be concerned if these kinds of ways of trying to influence policy actually lessen the influence of the digitally and socially excluded, but that seems unlikely to me. but interested in your thoughts.

posted over 3 years ago