From online to offline participation and viceversa : a software platform for new political practices

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a way for citizens to decide directly over the public expenditures. Every year people choose priorities and vote for concrete projects, rather than representatives and long-term political programs. This participatory process fits with the idea-based forms of online participation, but in PB they have to be \u201cembedded\u201d into a democratic process where the collaborative ideas are more likely to be financed than the individualistic ones. PBs can generate more social cohesion, foster citizens to live "smarter" and perhaps promote a more civic use of the web. Indeed, it also shapes the design of the web platform which supports the offline process. In this paper we present this original interaction between offline and online democracy, resulting from the enactment of the PB in four different local communities, and we outline the functionalities of a dedicated software. We finally discuss first outcomes of these early experiences, and draw some directions for future work

L'"arcobaleno dei diritti della cittadinanza digitale" alla prova

We live in a society shaped by information and communication technologies, a continuous interplay between what happens in the physical world and what happens online. This inevitably extends the citizenship concept which becomes digital, where rights and obligations are properly declined to meet technology opportunities. These opportunities, however, challenge the very idea of citizenship and the exercise of underlying rights. The authors, along with Leonardo Sonnante, proposed a layerization called \u201cThe rainbow of digital citizenship rights\u201d [De Cindio et al., 2012] to slice all aspects of digital citizenship in conceptual levels. The framework consists of abstraction layers spanning from basic network access up to the highest \u201cright to active involvement in policy-making.\u201d This article describes the framework first application. The authors, with their students (\u201cDigital Citizenship and Technocivism\u201d course) used it to analyze the \u201cPublic consultation on the fundamental principles of the Internet\u201d promoted by the italian Ministry of Education

A two dimensional space to frame participatory initiatives and platforms

The economic crisis is arousing social and political turbulence worldwide. In Italy this couples with a deep crisis of democratic legitimacy and an increasing demand for more participation in the public sphere. These dynamics met the opportunities offered by the web-based software tools for gathering ideas, and selecting them in a collaborative way through a more or less structured deliberative process. A significant number of online participation initiatives were therefore launched by different promoters: public institutions, political parties and their candidates during electoral campaigns, emerging social movements. These initiatives either run quite well established software or test new dedicated tools. This paper proposes a two-dimensional space for classifying these initiatives: one axis represents the \u201cdegree\u201d of citizens\u2019 engagement; the other one, the \u201cownership\u201d of the initiative. This framework has been recently presented in several occasions in Italy, including an invited lecture at a group of Senate officers. Almost always, the audience remarkably appreciated it as it allowed them to recognize similarities and differences among the various initiatives and the various tools. The question we want to discuss at the workshop is whether it holds also a scientific interest and relevance, toward a more rigorous evaluation of online participatio

Are Online Communities Good for the Civic Audit of Public Spaces, Services, and Officers?

While, the need of assessing public spaces, services and officers becomes, always more urgent and mandatory, a wide literature and extensive field experience show that internal audit by the public sector itself is not sufficient. There is the need to foster the civic accountability byintegrating an independent external evaluation in the audit process. The paper investigates the possibility that online communities provide a suitable framework for carrying on this external audit by supporting the so-called voice strategy in the contexts (such as the public sector) where the exit strategy does not hold. After envisaging the potential advantages coming from involving online communities of users in the assessment of a public space, service or officer, two early pilot experiments carried on to validate this assumption are presented and discussed. They are neither sufficient to validate the assumption nor sufficient to invalidate it, but provides hints helpful to pursue the investigation

Technology for e-Democracy: a Classification based on Italian Best Practices

This paper presents a survey carried out in preparation for the "Call for selection of projects to promote digital citizenship (e-democracy)" issued by the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technologies. On the basis of this survey, the paper presents a classification of ICT applications used in currently active e-participation initiatives. Each technology is presented by focusing the lessons (both pro and con) that have emerged from its use in actual tests, with a brief description of the most interesting cases