The Symposium Weblog

Laura Sommer (on the left in the photo — click to enlarge) is a Senior Advisor with the E-government Strategy & Policy team of the State Services Commission in New Zealand.

Also in the photo: Carol Hayward, (center) who works in local e-democracy and online consultation for the Bristol City Council, UK. On the right, Kátai Szabolcs with the Central European Business Centre in Budapest.

Laura recently posted this introduction to Steve Clift’s DoWire group on Online Consultations, Dialogues, and E-Participation.

And she just attached a comment with some feedback to a blog post Dylan wrote while in Budapest.

A note of appreciation from a wintery New Zealand to Dylan and his team for the ICELE symposium at Budapest.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet with e-participation specialists from the different countries. I have been working on the New Zealand e-government participation project for some time and have watched the UK Local e-Democracy project with interest. While I can continue to use the Internet as an excellent source of information on this huge topic area, it is enormously helpful to have conversations with other people who are also working on e-participation and e-democracy.

I didn’t regard it as a blogging conference but more an opportunity for us to work as an international community to exchange knowledge, lessons learned and consider and debate ideas.

The ICELE weblog with podcasts, photos and posts has also been a useful communication tool that I can refer for my work colleagues and other New Zealand contacts.

Thank you for enabling this exchange to happen and I look forward to continuing contact as our respective interests in this area progress.

regards, Laura

I took these photos of Tom Dawkins last week. (Click to enlarge.) He was one of presenters on the Innovative Ideas to Stir Citizens panel in Baltimore..

He’s the founder of Vibewire Youth Services in Australia and, according to this post on Steve Clift’s Dowire.org blog, this month he’s:

“… travelling around North America during August as part of a research trip to learn more about work being done around … digital/indie/youth media; online community; youth spaces (as in physical spaces, not virtual - specifically those designed to engender creative expression and/or enterprise development); digital arts/creativity; youth and citizenship; e-democracy.”

I just got an email from a UK colleague who I met in Budapest, Alice Chicken at 21Consultancy, alerting me to the fact that Tom just launched a weblog called tomd’s blog. In his initial post on Monday, he writes:

I’ve wanted to start a blog to give people, Vibewire.net members especially obviously, an insight into some of the background to Vibewire and our projects, a taste of some of the ideas floating around or projects which haven’t officially launched yet, more of a sense of the people behind the site and the Vibewire organisation and an opportunity for dialogue and feedback.

… in Baltimore last Thursday August 3, the day after I wearily arrived in the US. One of the sessions I went to was on ‘Leadership blogging’ (as opposed to perblogs, news blogs, opinion blogs, etc) by which he meant blogs kept by people in a leadership role (CEO, elected reprentatives, etc) which allow them to bring people into the decision-making process, to record a record of their thoughts, think through issues and so on. It all sounded exactly like what I’d been contemplated so I vowed to myself that at the next opportunity I really would start one this time.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom.

Symposium Director Dylan Jeffrey spoke at the end-of-day dinner and handed out small gifts of appreciation to those colleagues who helped work on the Symposium.

Closing remarks from:

Richard Kerby, United Nations Department for Economic and Social
Affairs Senior Inter-Regional Advisor on e-Government

Cllr. Matthew Ellis, Deputy leader of Lichfield Borough Council and member of Staffordshire County Council; Chair, ICELE

Dylan Jeffrey, Department for Communities and Local Government, United Kingdom and Symposium Director

7 minutes, 57 seconds

The panelists on e-Participation and e-Deliberation Best Practice included:

G. Scott Aikens, Robert B. Aikens and Associates

Richard Kerby, United Nations Department for Economic and Social
Affairs Senior Inter-Regional Advisor on e-Government

Steven Clift, Board Chair, E-Democracy.Org

Andrea Kavanaugh, Senior Research Scientist, Associate Director
Center for Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Virginia Tech

12 minutes, 30 seconds (I was able to only capture the audio from Steve and Andrea.)

Jonathan Bruel, Senior Fellow of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, and former senior advisor to the deputy of the Office of Management and Budget, presented on how to create a strategy to implement an e-Government agenda

21 minutes, 8 seconds

Steve Clift took this photo of me presenting on citizen journalism and leadership blogging.

What am I clutching in both fists? A laser pointer and a remote screen projector controller. Click to enlarge.

Note the Northfield.org slide in the background. It’s reminiscent of the photo from my presentation at Westminster in 2005.

With online elections getting quite a bit of buzz - and internet campaigning continually evolving, this session looked at what will be modernized and what still needs improvement in the world of e-Voting.

Alan Winchcombe, Head of Electoral Services at Swindon Borough Council


8 minutes, 22 seconds

Linda Lamone, Maryland State Board of Elections


7 minutes, 36 seconds

Lori Steele, CEO of Everyone Counts


7 minutes, 28 seconds

Roger Alan Stone, CEO of Advocacy Inc.


9 minutes, 5 seconds

This session explored ideas for engaging the large number of individuals who do not fully participate in the democratic process.

Steven Clift, Board Chair, E-Democracy.Org


2 minutes, 0 seconds (introductory comments)


4 minutes, 58 seconds (pre-discussion comments)

Carol Darr, Director, Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, George Washington University


11 minutes, 49 seconds

Pallas Snider, Anne Arundel County Student Forum, AACStudents.org


3 minutes, 42 seconds

Tom Dawkins, National Coordinator of Vibewire Youth Services


5 minutes, 48 seconds

Audience discussion

21 minutes, 33 seconds

eGov Monitor has a Q&A interview published today with Councillor Matthew Ellis, Chair of the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE).

Cllr. Ellis explores the local Democracy project (ICELE) and discusses the impact he would like the project to have on British democracy and tackling public apathy towards political engagement.

I’ve completed posting all the audio from the morning sessions at Baltimore. I’ll starting working on the afternoon sessions tomorrow.

Before I departed Baltimore, I snapped some photos of the inner harbor, just a block from our hotel. Just like my favorite shots of Budapest, here are my favorites from Baltimore. Click photos to enlarge.

Wondering about the costumes worn by the people by the pool and fountain in the last photo? They’re attendees from the annual Otakon convention, which includes a costume contest. According to the Wikipedi entry, “Otakon is a fan convention focusing on the art of anime and manga, East Asian culture, and its fandom.”

Jonathan Ortmans, President of Public Forum Institute, led participants through a process of identifying what is possible for the e-Democracy field for the future, specifically: “What could we do together? What should we be aspiring to achieve?”


3 minutes, 27 seconds

Participants at each table (see photos below, click to enlarge) discussed for 3 minutes what they felt was the most important issue for the future of e-democracy and then reported that to the entire group. Listen to the audio of the reports:

6 minutes, 2 seconds

The entire group then voted on these 9 items, using the Public Forum Institute’s eForum audience response system with the wireless, handheld units that I described in an earlier blog post.

The top vote getter was #6: Greater initiative, energy and engagement by citizens.

Presenters on how the United Kingdom is taking forward the e-Government and the e-Participation strategy included:

Julian Bowrey, Department for Communities and Local Government and Head of Division for Sustainable Communities, UK


12 minutes, 6 seconds

Julia Glidden, Managing Director of 21c Consultancy Ltd., UK


9 minutes, 21 seconds

Julian moderated the Q and A portion

9 minutes, 14 seconds

This presentation shared best practices and innovative e-Government strategies that have been put into practice around the world.

Daniel van Lehrberg, President of Politech Institute, Brussels


12 minutes, 48 seconds

Yigal Arens, Director, USC/Columbia Digital Government Research Center, USA


7 minutes, 57 seconds

Robert Deller, Research Associate, Politech Institute


8 minutes, 41 seconds

In Baltimore, Lawrence Pratchett (left) and Don Norris repeated their Budapest presentations on their comparative studies into local e-democracy at the municipal level in Europe and North America.

See these blog posts for their audio: Pratchett’s remarks; Norris’ remarks.

After their presentations, Dylan moderated the Q and A:

8 minutes, 29 seconds