by bengtfeil
Bengt Feil holds a diploma in political science and works at TuTech’s department InteractiveCommunication since 2007 mainly in the field of E-Democracy and increased citizen participation in planni... More about bengtfeil
eParticipation beyond political topics?
Right now we are thinking eParticipation mainly as a tool for political or administrative issues. But why stop there? eParticipation tools could be used any other area of discourse which needs the involvement many participants.
One example would be the development of long term strategies which affect a large population of a region. Adaptation to climate change is one of these large scale challenges and the Klimzug-Nord project in Germany tries to make use of eParticipation to tackle it.
On a much smaller scale cultural institutions could make use of eParticipatory tools to both improve their work and attract more visitors. The Helmsmuseum in Hamburg has already tried to take a step in this direction by using eTools to plan upcoming exhibitions.
Besides these two examples there are quite a few from the business sector like My Starbucks Idea or the Dell IdeaStorm.
These all hint at the fact that the lessons learnt in political eParticipation could be used very fruitfully in other areas of participation – as well as the other way around.
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Comments
Hi Bengt, interesting post. What are your experience and thoughts on going beyond textual comments. Its great to get lots of people to suggest lots of ideas and/or to participate in a discussion, but it is quite difficult for the output of this process to really impact the decision-making process. What is your experience of creating and using tools that enable citizens to explore issues to do with tradeoffs and conflicting priorities? Do you agree that it is important to find ways of aggregating people's views so they have more impact?
posted 10 months ago