Spartakan

Definitely the time of year for e-government conference paper submissions:

• MeTTeG08 - 2nd International Conference on Methodologies, Technologies and Tools enabling e-Government 25-26 September 2008 – Ionian University, Corfu, Greece
  Involving people in the area of electronic government from different perspectives and disciplines with a focus on the role played by the information and communication technologies. The main keywords are: methodologies, technologies and tools.
  (tags: 2008 conference e-government research)

I live in Scotland, so issues of national sovereignty are kind of in the air right now. I thought I’d share with the world a couple of items I’ve come across covering reasons why independence might (a) not happen, or (b) cause problems in the face of a natural disaster and an uncaring regime.

• Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure | openDemocracy
  No point trying to create general principles on what can become independent - it’s down to luck, leadership, geography, politics…
  (tags: government politics)
• Burma - Clive Soley’s take « Lords of the Blog
  National sovereignty (aka independence) from the other side: when should the world intervene to override the decision by a sovereign government to allow their people to die?
  (tags: government politics news 2008)

This time a workshop hosted by Brunel:

• eGovernment Workshop 2008 (eGOV0
  Workshop on 8 September calls for theoretical analysis, empirical research, or case studies that will provide us with a deeper insight into issues surrounding the use of Information and Communications Technology to achieve better government.
  (tags: conference 2008 egovernment edemocracy participation)

This PublicTechnology article gives good background, without providing a single useful link:

• News: ITIL V3 has been released
  ITIL V3: A Set of Best Practices for Managing Your IT Services :: PublicTechnology.net
  (tags: news security management ict 2008)

More on ITIL here.

Updates

1. I have now found an overview document on the IT service management forum site via an entry in ITIL Blues. Something to add to my reading pile.
2. I’ve now remembered that back in 2005, ISACA co-authored a document with the OGC which cross references the correspending concepts in COBIT (governance), ITIL (management) and ISO17799 (security) frameworks. The document can be downloaded via this page. Obviously, it’ll be ITILv2 that’s covered…

• EDemocracy Conferenz 2008 | 29-30 September 2008 - Krems, Austria
  
  Featuring some heavyweight e-participation academics including Ann Macintosh (my former boss). The main theme is now that the applications are available, it’s time to ask to what extent can E-Democracy support and enrich our democracy?
  • What and where are the interfaces, what methods can be used to integrate E-participation in present politics public administration processes?
  • How can we ensure that the greatest number of people are reached and are able to use the means of participation?
  • How can the modern media support political education?
  • How can the Internet increase participation in political discussion?
  • What are the limitations and the risks of E-Democracy?

• Euro mGov Conference | 15-16 September 2008 - Antalya, Turkey
  
  Prominent Representatives from European Public Sector will be invited to share their experiences, and discuss implemenation of mGovernment services and applications, the lessons learned, and the future of mGovernment revolution.
  (tags: conference research egovernment e-government project:eRepresentative mobile)

Deadlines for submission to both are very soon…

And for a bit of light relief, here’s a new online politics journal, mostly aimed at the European context as far as I can tell:

• JPoX.com | Journal of Political Excellence
  The modus operandi of the political system tends to be problem-driven and re-active. The long-term goal is to eradicate this sequence of events and become active or even pro-active.
  (tags: journal europe politics democracy edemocracy)

The relationship between open-source development methods and promotion of e-participation is often taken for granted; indeed many e-participation projects are funded on the condition that the code created is open-source. These notes for a possible research project question that assumption.

Starting by defining some terms. ‘Everyone’ knows that the term e-democracy needs to be distinguished from ‘e-Voting’ and to be understood in the context of the debate of the extent of participation that is supported – from informing citizens through to fully engaging them in the decision making process: this is called e-participation for clarity (Macintosh 2004).

Here it is enough to treat open source (OSS) and freeware together - I will use the common acronym FLOSS. The main point they share is that the source code is available to those implementing the software, and they are permitted to modify and re-distribute it as they wish, meaning that there is no commercial benefit to be gained by selling a FLOSS application; alternative revenue streams are required for sustainability.

The relationship between FLOSS development, internal democracy and e-participation

Superficially, FLOSS development methods provide a model for online democracy: however, while FLOSS projects may be open (in that the output is visible, and often the internal debates that underpin it), and ‘free’ (in that there is no formal control over what can be done with the code that is created); they are almost always successful precisely because of their non-democratic nature: they are led by a (generally self-appointed) individual or small group and are highly meritocratic (eg Elliot & Scacchi, 2003). Research has been carried out to investigate why FLOSS communities are dominated by young men (Ghosh & Glott 2006 – FLOSSPOLS): it is a fact that they do not represent the wider population. Where the public sector has implemented OSS systems, the driver has often been cost savings in the form of avoided license fees or perceived compliance with open data standards (eg Kovács, Drozdik et al 2004), rather than supporting democracy per se.

Many successful e-participation projects have taken advantage of the commercial but free-to-use services that have been appearing as part of the Web2.0 phenomenon including YouTube, MySpace and many blogging services such as TypePad or WordPress.

This leaves us with the question: does OSS have any special role in designing or building successful e-democracy (or e-participation) systems: how can we characterise the intersection between OSS, participation and democracy?

One approach

It would be interesting analyse OSS e-participation systems against previously established frameworks to establish common success factor, particularly focussing on the policy options available to public authorities (PAs) within the EU.

Researches are beginning to gain an understanding of how ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) are being used to support an participation process (for instance Tambouris et al, 2007, Peart & Diaz, nd) Broadly speaking, e-participation applications have been categorised around six or so dimensions, ranging from the technology used through to the political process that they support; the number varies depending on who is proposing the framework.

At the same time, a considerable amount of work has been carried out on the potential (positive) impact of OSS technologies on the EU economies generally (FLOSSPOLS, 2006), and effective approaches for PAs to engage with the OSS development processes in particular (Ghosh, Glott et al, 2004), highlighting the need for “users in PAs [to] interact extensively with developers”.

Similarly, the POSS project (Schmitz and Castiaux 2002) investigated the role of FLOSS in the public sector (focusing on Europe), and the appropriate policy response generally, particularly in sharing applications between PAs, taking advantage of one of the perceived advantages of OSS and recognising that PAs frequently use non-standard applications, or applications with no commercial equivalent. Nine factors in establishing the suitability of OSS for sharing between PAs can be applied to e-participation applications.

Generally they find that “the belief that any software can be given as open source, and then maintained and updated for free by an army of contributing volunteers is an illusion”: it is not clear that e-participation applications are an exception.

Combining these two frameworks could allow us to characterise the factors that affect the relative success of different strategies for implementing e-participation system, establishing the role that OSS applications and processes have had. The analysis could be carried out through a survey of successful e-participation applications.

Selected Bibliography

• Elliott, M.S. and W. Scacchi. 2003. Free Software Developers as an Occupational Community: Resolving Conflicts and Fostering Collaboration. Presented at GROUP’03 Conference, Sanibel Island, FL.
• Ghosh, R. A., R. Glott, et al. (2004). Guideline for Public Administrations on partnering with free software developers. (http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=19295)
• Ghosh, R. A. and R. Glott (2006). FLOSSPOLS D25: Final Integrated Report. Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Policy Support. Maastricht, MERIT, University of Maastricht: 79.
• Kovács, G.L., S. Drozdik, P. Zuliani, and G. Succi. 2005. Open Source Software for the Public Administration. Presented at Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies CSIT’2004, , 2004, Budapest, Hungary.
• Macintosh, A. (2004). Characterizing E-Participation in Policy-Making. in Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
• Peart, M. N., J. R. Diaz (nd) Comparative Project on Local e-Democracy Initiatives in Europe and North America. Research Centre on Direct Democracy, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva (http://edc.unige.ch/download/ESF%20-%20Local%20E-Democracy.pdf)
• Schmitz, P.-E. and S. Castiaux (2002). Pooling open source software (POSS). UNISYS. (http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=1977)
• Tambouris E., N. Liotas and K. Tarabanis (2007) A framework for Assessing eParticipation Projects and Tools, Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4-6 January 2007.

Two stories showing two different techniques for grabbing the encryption hash out of a PC’s memory.

• USB Hacks: Endpoint Insecurity
  Description of USB-based hacking tools so that system administrators can better defend against them. Provides applications and if possible the source code so that security professionals can better protect their networks from these risks through testing an
  (tags: security hardware tools audit)
• Hit by a Bus: Physical Access Attacks with Firewire | Adam Boileau - Ruxcon 2006
  DMA access from any firewire device as part of the spec - now over Wireless. Great potential for capturing memory images…
  (tags: security presentation 2006 hardware audit)

Until reading Boileau’s presentation, I had not appreciated the fundamental difference between Firewire and USB. Because Firewire is a part of the main bus, any Firewire device has full access to the first 4G of memory…

• Schneier on Security: The RSA Conference
  Selling security products direct to customers will die. They care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations are something the infrastructure providers should pay attention to. Scheier says that the computer security business should be more like the creators of car safety features: essential, but not sold directly to end users. Instead, the features (ABS, firewalls) should be integrated by the manufacturers (Ford, Microsoft, Tiscali)
  (tags: business security conference 2008 opinion)
• IT Audit | IT Governance
  Page from IT Governance Ltd. They say they source, create and deliver products and services to meet the real-world, evolving IT governance needs of today’s organizations, directors, managers and practitioners. The pages lists some useful resources for a wide range of corporate and IT governance information, advice, guidance, books, tools, training and consultancy.
  (tags: uk audit resource isaca ict)

So far, FP7 has had a low emphasis on e-participation, at least compared to FP6. Two events hosted by the European Commission under their Information Society FP7 programme are coming up next month that look like they will change things.

1. eParticipation Information Day

Come to the eParticipation Information Day and find out what funding opportunities are available within the eParticipation Preparatory Action following the expected adoption of the 2008 Work Programme by the end of April.

The Information Day is scheduled for May 20 2008 in Brussels and a draft agenda for the day has been published.

2. Consulation on visualisation and mass collaboration

Are you interested in policy modelling, opinion visualisation, mass collaborative platforms, large-scale societal simulations? A consultation meeting is being organised on May 28 2008 in the context of the preparation of the Work Programme for 2009 -2010 of the 7th Research Framework Programme.

This sounds interesting, particularly in the context of the recent attention being given to the impact on politics social networking sites and ITC’s past work in argument visualisation:

Hopefully one of us will attend at least one of these - they should be good places for networking with practitioners from around Europe.

My experience of political Facebook groups has been a combination of mass hysteria (everyone joins) and then no action (all I see is people joining, and then later, leaving). There is more to Web 2.0 politics though,  and the academic community is starting to get to grips with studying its implications.

Earlier this month, the Royal Holloway University ran an international conference on Politics Web 2.0. You can read some live blogging by Michah Sifrey at PoliticsWeb2.0: On the Future of Government in the Digital Era on Techweb, and follow a few links from there to get an idea of what was talked about.

One of my favourite academic bloggers - Ulises Mejias (aka i d e a n t) - attended. He looks at the theoretical issues and notes some themes that interested him on his blog here Politics and the web and here: Social Networks and the Politics of Nodocentrism

I don’t have time to think it through right now, but is is the time to be considering (for example) whether

the emphasis on speed that these technologies introduce might be detrimental to the emergence and enactment of political will

I wonder if the real action comes from the interactions between the authors of (owned) blogs, not vague, easy to join networks on Facebook, MySpace.

(tags: politics research SNA project:demo_net 2008 participation)