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The article is devoted to the analysis of the mechanism of information and analytical support of e-democracy’s development in Ukraine and development of scientifically substantiated practical recommendations to the public authorities in terms of its improvement. The authors assessed its condition, identified the main sources and users of information, the authorities responsible for data collection and processing, the main shortcomings, etc. It is proposed to expand the range of sources of information on the state of development of e-democracy by adding to it public organizations, public associations, independent experts and international organizations, as well as the main users of this information: the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Digital Transformations, public organizations and relevant international organizations. In order to increase the reliability and accuracy of the results of monitoring of e-democracy development, it is proposed to introduce a number of additional procedures: comparison of the results of analysis and assessment of the level of e-democracy at the stage of formation of final indicators; determining the level of difference in results; verification of the results obtained from various subjects of research; involvement of scientific and research institutions in the procedures of development of the methodology for assessing the level of development of e-democracy and analysis of world experience on this issue by specialists of the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Recommendations to the central executive bodies (CEB) on improving the current mechanism of information and analytical support for the development of e-democracy in Ukraine are substantiated. Taking into account the international experience, a method for assessing the state of e-democracy development has been developed, which will increase the level of objectification of information and analytical support for e-democracy development.

With a growing demand of online participation, more local authorities are engaging with residents through online-participation projects in order to include them within decision-making processes. However, some groups are more difficult to reach and are often forgotten when it comes to political participation: migrants and refugees. Studies have shown that political participation can help migrants and refugees in settling within their host country. Therefore, it is necessary that refugees have the opportunity of participating in local and national politics as well. In order to find out how migrants and refugees can be reached via online participation, this paper will look at several projects of online participation and determine solutions of how migrants and refugees can get more involved within their community through online participation as a non-formal way of participating politically. The results will help local authorities in establishing tools to effectively involve migrants and refugees within local politics.

The rapid development of the technological media and the improvement of communication have turned the world into a “global village”. This term was claimed by the scientist Marshal McLaren, who predicted future development of the world into a global system. As a village, the world becomes smaller with interdependence and inter-state relations. This dependence is expressed both economically and socially. A period of globalization is characterized by the recognition of new global issues, such as global warming, natural disasters, the struggle against poverty and others. These problems require humanity to cooperate in an international framework. However, the recognition itself does not provide the solutions to these problems, and despite the technological and social connections on the Internet, we are still witnesses to government methods that based on concepts and technologies from the previous centuries. Modern nation states that based on cumbersome mechanisms of government and decision making, cannot cope with the challenges they face in the technological age. Making decisions in its institutions are slow with a problem to create cooperation (even when there is apparently a common interest). All of these reasons lead to a large gap between government institutions and technological development. One of the most prominent solutions that are supposed to bridge this gap is the combination of advanced communication technology with government concepts. This tool is called digital democracy or e-democracy. That study requires qualitative research based on a thorough distinction of the subject. The study needs to review various theories from the subject of the social and political sciences, humanities, economics, and law with linkage to the resent technological development and new management possibilities. It is important to note that a solution to the problems I have presented before, is not easy and unequivocal. The use of technology and communication is also connected to many various dangers such as terrorism, fundamentalism, and moral nihilism. Therefore, in the one hand, an accurate distinction and in-depth research are needed to help identify the weaknesses of contemporary liberal democracy in order to strengthen them, from the other hand and preserve the strengths and mechanisms that are supposed to swallow the formation of anarchy.

This research tries to know how the political interaction of the citizens from the center of Ecuador is on the Internet. Every day more people use new technologies in order to learn about political issues. Virtual media allow different forms of citizen participation, making the traditional ones such as television, radio o written press to be obsolete. Through an online questionnaire, people were asked about the use of the political information in the different channels, and especially, about their participation in the last election campaign of 2017. The results show different patterns according to factors such as gender, age or occupation, confirming a panorama of transition between offline and online media.

This paper presents the findings of a PhD research that aims to evaluate the processes of electronic participation (e-Participation) and electronic democracy (e-Democracy) introduction in Switzerland. The choice of the Swiss case study can be explained by a seeming paradox between, on the one hand, highly developed system of direct democracy, which determines the character of the Swiss policy-making process, and, on the other, the current lack of e-Democracy initiatives. The empirical part of the project consists in semi-structured interviews conducted in different departments of the Swiss federal administration. The first important findings from the interviews are three-fold: economic logic seems to play an important role in public sector digitalisation; federalist system causes the uptake of initiatives to be highly fragmented; and public actors' attitudes and beliefs are decisive for the success of e-Participation and e-Democracy initiatives.

Research in social computing has provided a number of ways to engage people in collective endeavors, from collective mapping and encyclopedia-writing to localized support and personalized appeals. This talk reviews a variety of social computing research with an eye towards application in E-Democracy and E-Government. How can governments use the techniques and lessons of this research to better engage citizens? How can citizens organize themselves to better influence and support regional and national governments?

This article considers e-democracy as a socio-political resource and technology of the etatist model of Russian modernization. Based on the results of theoretical and empirical studies the article reveals the positive / negative factors affecting the legitimacy of public authorities and governance, Russian citizens' involvement in the political process. The analysis is focused on the risks and threats, institutional distortions that appear in the process of implementing e-democracy, as well as society and state security. The paper is based on the materials obtained during realization by the authors of the grant supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities and Administration of the Volgograd region. The perspectives of functioning of e-democracy in the context of implementation of innovative communication technologies are defined.

One of the main problems that are facing governments when introducing technologies in their decision making processes (elections, referendums, consultations…) is how to approach security and transparency. Usually these two concepts are easy to understand in a traditional process, because can be supervised and audited by human means. When introducing technology in democratic processes, everything is happening in a logical dimension: programs that are executed inside computers. Therefore, the transparency of the democratic process is compromised because difficulties to audit it. This talk will introduce how transparency is bring back to electronic process by means of cryptographic verifiable techniques (also known as E2E verifiability). It will also show the implications from the point of view of a voter, observer or independent auditor, and finally how governments are adopting these mechanisms in their election systems.

Citizen participation in Government's decisions has been a constant struggle since the earliest civilizations. In the ancient Greece, Aristotle said that decisions of all things should depend on the general Citizens Assembly; that judges were elected by lot and for a limited time; and that election is not depended of the importance of his fortune. To reach this objective, the society, especially the occidental one, has been implementing different forms of participation in order to achieve this objective, in a process not exempt from difficulties. A solution to this problem has been the representative democracy; but in recent years, the so-called crisis of representative democracies has been so evident that we have seen decreases in the citizen participation percentages in elections, because they have seen no actions on their representatives, making long lasting the evils pointed by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. To respond to this drop in participation, different initiatives seeking to bring closer to the citizen the daily decisions of society had emerged. The objective of this study is to analyze the major initiatives implemented and the main problems attached to them. Analysis has shown that security is the main problem facing the majority of the initiatives, meaning privacy, uniqueness, traceability and integrity.

Democracy, the people Government power, seeks that decisions are made by all citizens and represent their will. But somehow, the practice of the democracy has turned into a synonymous to elections, an act where common citizens participates in politics only at the ballot day, once every four or five years. This fact decreases civil participation in the whole world, causing what it has been named the crisis of the political parties. The use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and new forms of participation in government through the exercise of the participatory budgets, seem to be an effective way to revert the civil apathy. In this paper, an alternative fuzzy model to E-Government and E-Democracy decision is proposed. This model is based in mobile technologies, to avoid the decrease of the civil participation in the democratic government; and a linguistic process of group decision based on the affinity between citizens using natural language and LAMA operators, to obtain a representative final opinion for the decision.

The purpose of the present study is to evaluate local e-government initiatives in Greece from a citizens' perspective. Towards this end, an instrument was developed that contained 14 indices and assessed citizens' perceived importance of e-government as well as e-democracy features incorporated in municipal portals. Results indicate that Greek citizens are not ready to move forward with the adoption of more participatory and deliberative tools of local governments' websites. Findings indicate that Greek citizens want easy to complete online services while they place emphasis on the informational content of the local governments' websites. In addition they desire simple ways to communicate with their local governments such as contact or email forms and suggestion boxes.

In this paper we propose a model of e-university, where teaching and learning processes are formalized. In this model we appeal to the following two types of games: reflexive games and computer-based problem-solving games. These games are used for seminars and assessments. Reflexive games play a crucial role in grouping courses into one curriculum. Hence, e-university is proposed to be organized by means of the so-called reflexive management.

Despite governmental efforts to facilitate elections and voting procedures for citizens in Jordan, there is a need for more governmental initiatives to ensure a high level of participation by voters in the election process, in particular, in the parliamentary election. This paper introduces the concept of e-voting as one potential governmental initiative that would provide the citizenry with a new method of voting. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate people's interaction with e-voting and to address the main factors that may influence their intention to engage with e-voting as a new way of choosing their representative in parliament. This study used an established e-government adoption model to present the main predictors for voters' intentions to use an online voting system. By addressing these factors, the government in Jordan could build a strategy to market and introduce e-voting as a new method of choosing members of the House of Representative. This research paper provides a foundation for future empirical studies on e-voting adoption.

As a result of the technological revolution, postal systems that were once viewed as efficient, trusted and inclusive have rapidly come to be seen as outdated, expensive and slow. Even though posts are still recognised as essential to citizens, they are showing evidence of decline. A direct effect of this decline is that the ability of posts to fulfill their universal service obligation (USO) is slowly being eroded. Ironically, research shows that, in order to protect their personal information online, citizens still seek trusted and efficient systems with which to interact, The aim of this paper is to present a privacy-enhanced Digital Postal Solution (DPS) designed to create public value through reducing citizens' privacy concerns while providing secure government 2.0 services. Additionally, the DPS restores, in digital format, the full gamut of traditional universal services afforded by posts to citizens in earlier times. Additionally, it provides citizens with a platform where they can avail of web 2.0 technologies to interact with government, making way for a more transparent and collaborative relationship between government and the public. It also provides every citizen with a private digital space, where they can securely access, process and store (un)official and personal information such as bills, receipts, health and financial records. In summary, from this space, citizens can begin to fully and safely interact with digital society.

Development of automated work regime, internal intranet network and web-site provides efficiency in the parliament activity. However, these technologies applied in the parliament activity can not realize electronic democracy principles entirely. If taking into account these principles - direct participation of citizens in the process of law making, requirements and proposals, etc. the importance of application of more effective electronic technology in the parliament activities emerges. Considering this, in terms of the settlement of problems in the electronic parliament activity, the application of Wiki technologies is proposed in the given paper. Advantages of Wiki technology use in the e-parliament activities are indicated. The e-parliament opportunities based on Wiki technology are analyzed, as well.

E-government is one of the buzzwords in discussing modernizing public administration. With the help of the information and communication technologies (short for ICTs), especially the internet, the resulting new and better government is seen to be more responsive to the needs of citizens and enterprise, more democratic, and more efficient. One of the most important benefits of e-government is that it can enhance e-democracy. This paper will show you in what ways e-government enhance e-democracy.

From the perspective of the typical characteristics of e-democracy and considering the bottleneck problems related to the digital divide, e-authoritarian, moral insufficiency and absence of security legislation in China, this paper purports to narrow the digital divide through building a network communication platform, making full use of governmental functions to support and assist the network construction in the outlying and poverty-stricken areas and enlarging universal education regarding relevant technology. In order to carry out network legislation and moral management, this paper proposes speeding up the legalization, standardization and network realization to create e-democracy. In addition, a balanced mechanism of e-democracy with Chinese characteristics is set up from the election, decision-making and supervision system of e-democracy.

The e-Democracy has great significance on democratic political development of china. According to the latest data of “the 26th China Internet Development Statistics Report”, the paper pointed out its positive impact on citizen' political participation, and analyzed the factors that hinder the e-Democracy development of China. Then it proposed some advices to promote the development of e-Democracy and political participation.

Ethical issues should go along with development in the age of globalization; same is the case with Information Technology (IT), a sub domain of Technology. IT is growing and developing rapidly with the lightening speed, probably leaving some ethical issues, considerations, principles and legal requirements lagging behind. The future of ethical IT plays an significant and realistic role in the way of bright and flourishing world. The idea and efforts to use ethics in IT gives an open, safe, transparent and reliable environment to the society. New directions of conceptualization and interpretation enables people to see the Information Technology-Society Relationship differently and therefore, interpret its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Today, IT and globalization together gave world the terms like, Universal Access, Digital Divide, e-content, e-Democracy, Hacking, Cyber Crimes and Cyber War, the newly added concepts and problems. This paper explores and discusses about the Moral and Ethical issues their applications and practices in the new era of Information Technology.

Electronic democracy is a new democracy form taking advanced information and communication technology, network and relevant technologies as the operation platform, direct democracy as development trend, taking citizens' partaking in democratic operation procedures collectively, initiatively and practically such as democratic decision-making and democratic election as typical feature. Political democratization trend, abuse of traditional democracy i.e. democratic representative system, citizens' desire of partaking in political affairs, development of social economy, advanced information and communication technologies are main reasons for development of electronic democracy. In modern political life, electronic democracy plays a role in supplying necessary information, training citizens' participation skills, inspiring citizens' democratic participation enthusiasm, improving citizens' political participation, enhancing legality of government and improving political decision-making, the development of electronic democracy supplies the growth space for direct democracy.

E-democracy is a new form of democracy in the internet age. E-democracy plays active roles in democratic construction in China. However, the information asymmetries, the inadequate of government administration, imperfectness of relevant laws, and the absence of internet ethics, all restrained the building of E-democracy. Therefore, great efforts should be made to strengthen development of information system, strengthen political civilization development and improve government operation mechanism. In addition, it is quite essential to speed up internet legislation and perfect the system of internet ethical codes.

With the rapid development of information and network technology, e-democracy came into being. As a new means and channel of democratic participation, there are two essential perspectives of e-democracy. On the one hand, it plays a kind of positive role; on the other hand, there are some limitations and problems. In this paper, first of all, the author affirmed the positive role of e-democracy, then analyzed its limitations and problems, and proposed the methods and countermeasures to overcome these limitations. The author believed that the main problems in e-democracy lie as follows: e-democracy can only be a kind of means, but not the end; e-democracy over-publicized the instrumental rationality, which would lead to the decline of the value of rationality; e-democracy is also facing the problems of fairness, and furthermore, there is the plight of ethical anomie in e-democracy. Among the above problems, the author believed that we could start from the following aspects: strengthening the construction of infrastructure; distributing the resources equitably; developing and improving education, so as to make all classes of people have access to electronic information and communication technology; strengthening the legal system and creating a favorable legal environment; strengthening the construction of ethical system to form a good environment of public opinion; and enhancing the technical control.

Citizen e-participation supplies powerful drive and rare opportunity for democracy development, meanwhile, it also confronts with large challenges and risks, which is mainly embodied at: first, “digital gap” problem is obvious, the subject, capability and wish of citizen network political participation are featured by unbalance and may be dissimilated to be “network noble democracy”, due to unbalanced development of China’s economy and society and dual-division of rural and urban areas. Second, individualism, liberalism and citizen globalization concept prevail in network era, which makes the state traditional political authorization lowered and citizen e-participation may confront with the situation of being out of control. Third, the phenomena of information explosion, information crowd and “group polarization” lead to irrationalism, extremeness of citizen’s political participation on Internet, which will do harm to democratization course of Chinese e-participation. Aimed at these problems, first, China’s government should devote itself to eliminating “digital gap” and accelerating construction of information infrastructure and prevalence of computer network knowledge to supply opportunity of equal network political participation to citizens. Second, China’s government should rule Internet with law and strengthen control and management for network information node, purify information network space, perfect the systems of issuance of government information on Internet, direct communication between government officials and public on Internet to strive to form good “appeal-response” mechanism of interaction between officials and citizens. Third, government should further improve citizens’ political quality and network ethic quality to cultivate citizens’ political participation in culture, and perfect network ethic criterion system.

Throughout the last decade, eDemocracy has evolved from an idea into practical applications supporting, and even enhancing, democratic processes. At the same time, it is a growing demand for regulatory frameworks to support eDemocracy. This paper examines the technical and political prerequisites for eDemocracy in an attempt to uncover possible areas for regulative measures. A model is used to show the internal relations between a set of technical and political prerequisites. This model can be used to plan regulatory measures related to eDemocracy on national, regional and local levels of government. The paper also introduces, through practical examples, three different approaches to regulation.

This paper summarized the main measures in New Zealand e-government construction by the way of the literature research and example analysis, such as setting up New Zealand e-government website, implementing government shared network project and constructing the public sector intranet (PSI); it summed up the characteristics of New Zealand e-government construction, including government’s leadership, technology input and public participation. At last, it provided practical guidance which can be used for reference by China, such as strengthening the leadership to the development of e-government, increasing the technology input to e-government construction further and developing broad e-democracy to provide channels for public participation. The results show that China may spare no effort to realize these steps.

Experimental data sets related to e-voting systems are very demanding in order to improve currently deployed e-voting machines. Unfortunately, the studies of such data about the machines' security, performance and their evolution with respect to the social and technical aspects are still unsatisfactory. During the last four years we have been involved in the development, experimentation, and evaluation of an e-voting system. The system tried out in several regular elections, and also used in two small elections with legal value. Each experiment provided various sociological (e.g. citizens' opinions on the system) and technical data that are related to system's performance and behavior. In this paper, we present various technical insights and the lessons learned during the e-voting experiment. The methodology for the various experiments we have carried-out and the data sets collection process are also discussed. This helps to confirm existing data on the subject (e.g., data related to security, procedures and logistics) and, in some cases, provide novel information or, at least, shed a new perspective on some security-critical factors concerning e-voting systems.

The ability of citizens to participate in the government system is a key issue for governments in developing countries as these countries have limited and inflexible infra-structural information and communication technology (ICT) facilities. ICT can support the establishment of electronic interaction between citizens and government bodies just as e-commerce systems facilitate customers’ services in traditional online businesses. e-Democracy or e-participation initiatives imply electronic-based government services for enhancing electronic interaction between citizens and government bodies. The services of e-participation require use of Internet infrastructure and web based applications as well as end user devices such as personal computers, laptops or PDAs. This paper proposes an infrastructure for user centric e-participation services in a developing country context.

Over the last 15 years, there has been a gradually increasing awareness of the need to consider innovative applications of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for participation that enables a wider audience to actively contribute to democratic decision-making. There is reason enough to believe that ICT can indeed change politics. Especially the weblog technology seems to have that potential in certain countries, as the following research proposal suggests. Why not in Germany?

Despite the notable growing citizens participation enabled by the new advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT), especially with the introduction of web 2.0, developing countries seems to lag way behind in the utilization of these advancements toward the empowerment of citizen's for more participation and democratization in decision making. However, this lag is not only due to underutilization of ICT tools only, other challenges face this transition. These vary from pure political barriers such as the very slow democratization process to weak ICT infrastructure. This paper seeks to understand, address and document the Jordanian experience of both side's government and citizens in the transition to e-democracy. The analysis of this case studies showed that, citizens are taking lead and gaining more power day by day despite the weak governmental push for effective citizenpsilas participation. Therefore, we argue that this represent a growing challenge for governments to direct and respond quickly to the growing public power empowered by e-democracy. Consequently, governments need to account and shift their classical e-government models toward more e-democratic oriented model that leverage democracy and secure citizens rights of participation in decision making.

This work will be consider the relationship between state authority, Internet policies and civil rights in three countries: Italy (EU), Serbia (Europe) and Burma-Myanmar1 (Asia). It will provide an overview about the debate existing in these countries, where it is possible to point out a common trend of restrictions of civil rights due to surveillance and control actions of the authorities on the ICTs. If, in the extreme case of Burma-Myanmar, these actions consist in a ban on using the Internet freely for the citizens, in the other countries they create legal contradictions not easily solved, which may prefigure increasing restrictive measures for the future and risks for the e-democracy.

It is widely recognized that ICT both affect and are affected by the socio-political environment into which it is introduced and functioning. Because of the neutrality of technology, ICT can act as a magnifier and multiplier of the inherent tendencies and characteristics of the spaces in which it is implemented and either support or undermine those values. ICT can be considered not only as a mean of exchanging and disseminating information but can also be a tool to enhance human rights. There is however always an important risk that inappropriate use of ICT could undermine those rights, disenfranchise particular socio-economic groups and attack the fundamental institutions of democracy. The aim of this paper is to discuss existing international regulatory mechanisms related to human rights in the context of the digital society. There are ongoing efforts to introduce new mechanisms to regulate the digital society, and this contribution seeks to highlight current strengths and limitations of existing international regulations governing human rights issues.

This paper presents a conceptual model for collaboration between government, individuals and voluntary organizations to provide innovative digital services to the public. The government provides the necessary infrastructure, application software and basic content, with the opportunity for individuals and voluntary organizations to provide additional content. This approach makes it possible to deliver services of greater value to the public. Two Norwegian case examples are used to show the practical use of this conceptual model. The first case, "The Digital Inn", shows how the Norwegian National Archival Services use collaboration to enhance its service to genealogists. The second case describes "The Map Hostel", a project to better utilize geographic information systems by delivering new maps based on information collected by voluntary organizations and individuals.

E-democracy is a necessity in this era of computers and information technology. E-voting is one of the most significant parts of e-democracy, which refers to the use of computers or computerized voting equipment to cast ballots in an election. This is a study on e-voting requirements specifically pointing out its implementation in Turkey. Nowadays, the Turkish Government has begun to test an e-voting system, which has been developed by a private company for Turkish electoral needs. Since there is neither technical nor academic comprehensive documentation available regarding the system, we are not sure about that it may or may not be a satisfactory solution to Turkish electoral needs. The aim of this paper is to define an extensive set of requirements that any e-voting system, which is planned to be used instead of paper-based voting system in the countries that have representative democracy so as in Turkey, should satisfy

Recent developments (e.g., e-government, e-democracy, e-voting, etc.) of the information society expose the limits of system security. The ubiquitousness of information technology relies on stringent system requirements. Although new technology addresses technical problems and provides new challenges, new technology often gives rise to new hazards. In order to identify mitigation actions, it is necessary to understand diverse multidisciplinary aspects. The complexity and multidisciplinary of information technology require us to investigate new mechanisms that address general requirements (e.g., trust, security, etc.). A debate on the problems arising in particular information society scenarios would benefit from a broad multidisciplinary audience. This panel advocates a multidisciplinary debate on e-democracy: how democratic will e-democracy be?.

This paper proposes the use of grid computing platforms as an enabling infrastructure for e-democracy applications. The paper identifies a set of infrastructures and services that can be provided by grid computing platforms which are fundamental for distributed e-democracy applications. A scenario of an e-Democracy application in the field of policy formulation is described and some details of an ongoing implementation are discussed.

The paper discusses genre theory in the field of e-Democracy. A framework for analysing communicative genres related to four stereotypical e-Democracy models is suggested. A case study of a web based discussion board in a municipality illustrates the implications of applying the genre lens to the e-Democracy research and practice, with lessons learned to considered in the future efforts on e-Democracy. Based on observations from the case, a theoretical concept of autopoietic cybergenre is suggested and its potential significance for future e-Democracy initiatives is addressed. An autopoietic cybergenre, such as a web-based discussion board, includes inherent capability for meta-communication enabling continuous structuring of the purpose(s) and parts of the form of the genre in question itself.

The authors describe an addition to the conversation regarding enhanced democracy through technologically-assisted means (e-democracy) focusing on enhancing and expanding the typically unidirectional flow of statutes and procedural documentation from government to individuals. A new knowledge creation application is described that significantly improves the utility of available public records and enhances the ability of citizens to use them to ensure better and more consistent governmental outcomes. The application, called Minutes-n-Motion, uses neural net search algorithms to create multidimensional knowledge cubes inserted into a user-friendly interface to allow user-defined structuring of public information. The application improves access to public records and allows users to evaluate public actions in details from multiple perspectives with relative ease, thereby improving public official accountability and both the fairness and the consistency of the public process.