Parts 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7.
4.4 town meetings, old and new
A natural democratic form is a gathering (an assembly) of all citizens of a place, be it a village or town, to share problems, debate issues of common concern and decide on collective action. An assembly of this type, termed a "town meeting", which must have its roots in human pre-history, came into regular use several hundred years ago and to some extent is still used in communities of the eastern United States of America. The "town meeting", because all citizens are ideally present and have the right to be heard, is also a symbol of direct democracy. Major problems of organisation arise not only because "representative" forms of government tend to emerge and so displace direct (citizens') decision making, but also because of the difficulty to deal with large communities or units such as large cities and states. How can 100,000 citizens meet? Well, perhaps in a football stadium - but how can all the "football fans" discuss and decide on a public issue? With the emergence of ICT it is not surprising that the question - of whether ICT can be applied to allow large groups of citizens to participate in "town meetings" - should be raised. Good collective decisions cannot be reached by voting rapidly on a proposal (motion) but also require information, preparation, opportunities to question, consult, debate and "deliberate". So, can some or all of these functions be built into a system which might be termed the "electronic town meeting"?
There are a number of projects which aim to demonstrate that "electronic" or ICT-assisted town-meetings are possible and useful. (See "Choosing Our Future (COF) and item 3.5 about the Reform Party of Canada.) These projects overlap and in some cases have grown out of older attempts to gather "in-depth" citizens' opinion on important public issues (see for example 3.7 about the Jefferson Centre). Some comments on projects and innovations with "electronic town meetings" (ETMs), juries and panels appear elsewhere in this paper.
4.5 Role of governments, industry, commerce and providers of information technology: facing the demands of citizens (receivers and transmitters)
Although citizens may choose to increase their participation, their self-determination and self-government by means of argument and discourse, by peaceful protest and struggle, or by violence, it cannot be denied that those at present in positions of power may influence if, and at what rate, the right and ability to participate be increased or indeed decreased. Thus, governments may "open" their proceedings and take more into acount the opinions of citizens. Through "freedom of information" laws, "government on-line" and intensive public opinion polling these things have already happened in some countries. Politicians, especially in systems where candidates are elected personally rather than anonymously from a party list, have a strong interest to know in detail what their potential voters think. Some (Compare 3.4 and 3.5 above, the Reform Party of Canada - theirs appeared to be responses to popular demand, based on election promises.) may be motivated by apparently genuine wishes to improve democracy. Commercial concerns (businesses) and "non-profit" initiatives may play an important role by offering services which can facilitate citizens' access to information about government (e.g. Internet service providers, television companies which offer interactivity, organisers of ETMs, "electronic brokers" of political analyses and information (e.g. 3.1 above, California Voters Foundation). Electronic and communication scientists, and those who funded them, have obviously played a crucial role, by first making modern ICT possible. But citizen demand and feed-back to manufacturers of computer hard- and software and to ICT service providers have played very important roles here too. Consider only the development of the Internet, which grew out of a north american networked communication sytem built to survive a nuclear war. The enormous demand by citizens for information, access to and improved manageablity of data, and for enhanced human communication has lead to the emergence of highly sophisticated and increasingly "user-friendly" ICT systems. (See remarks in Introduction on "ICT may change the ways in which government works" and on dangers of "informatisation", with perhaps "Orwellisation" of government and society.)
To date, ICT has allowed many millions of citizens to become receivers of electronic information, e.g. via e-mail. Also, in a limited way, all these people may transmit their ideas and views, again by e-mail, sometimes via a "home page" in the WWW. Usually, a citizen may not initiate a formal Internet or Usenet discussion unless she or he has quite advanced ICT skills and has access to expensive "hard-" and "software". "Organising" cyberspace, and political organising within it, has so far been performed by a relatively small minority. These are in the main the "providers" of Internet and related services, the large and small commercial and non-profit concerns (ISPs), the academic institutes and some official bodies (e.g. the European Commission). Potentially, these institutions and groups can steer and control development and functions of cyberspace, and the citizens who visit and use it. Further analysis of the role of possible "cybercrats" will not be attempted in this paper.
4.6 citizens organise in (and out of) cyberspace. Some examples in real-life.
The "internet surfer" who is also politically educated will probably conclude that political information on a particular theme is often difficult to locate and is commonly of quite low quality. Links to other source which could fill in knowledge and information gaps are often not provided. The branching "tree of knowledge" promised by ICT has not yet grown leaves and has born very little fruit! Exisiting political initiatives, e.g. political parties, pro-environment groups, do not fully exploit ICT and certainly do not "reach out" to citizens in an ideal way.
Despite claims about revolution to be expected as a result of "information super-highways" some things do not change too quickly. For example, most citizens of the rich industrialised countries don't imagine that they personally could nor should do anything to promote direct democracy, neither to improve participation in public decision-making. Most people, and this applies to academics as well as other citizens, at least in Europe, do not know why they might need an Internet connection. And most, having connected, would not dream of using it to promote social change or for political purposes. The latter remarks are based on recent Internet forum discussions and also extrapolated from work on "non-cyber" political participation (Boehnke and Macpherson 1989).
However, given the rates of technical development and application of ICTs, and the expectation that more and more citizens will obtain access to the systems, it may be predicted that ICTs will increasingly be used as instruments of politics and social activism.
Citizens may organise, e.g. to protest against injustice in distant lands, or widely and rapidly spread information to gain support for political ideas (e.g. against Internet censorship, the case of Ejército Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional EZLN in Chiapas, the reported "electronic" support for the democracy movement in the crumbling USSR, the protest against repression in Tianmen Square, Beijing. See further examples in section 3, above). The organisation of citizens to take more power via direct democracy and participation, assisted by ICTs or otherwise, is minimal at present, partly because, except in a few countries, effective (competent) access to ICT is percentually very low. The lobby for democratic reform in general is weak, although probably growing, in the rich "western-style" democracies. ICT may aid efforts to organise, raise consciousness and build the political will for changes which will allow improved participation (formally, via legislation and in some cases changing or writing constitutions).
See further comments in item 5.5 "self-organisation for rights to participate and direct democracy".
4.7 Preliminary discussion and critique of projects and programmes in and out of cyberspace.
Looking at the numerous projects which aim to improve the democratic process and social integration by using ICT, what is the relevance and status of citizen to citizen communication and to what extent are there meaningful opportunities to participate? Some of these projects, e.g. MED (see URL, Minnesota Electronic Democracy, glossary below), British on-line project (described above) , claim to be initiatives founded by and run for citizens. These projects tend to depend on a small group of dedicated enthusiasts, often volunteers. They offer information, commonly about the election process, candidates, government and administration. (See Table). They may present issues of political controversy, often striving to fairly present several points of view of parties or interest groups. In some cases, e.g. CVF, MED, many thousands of citizens have at least logged in via the Internet. The citizens role has been mainly that of the spectator. But that may change. The various electronic democracy and community network projects offer their ICT services for participatory functions which include public fora (forums) on specified topics, e.g. health care, traffic; "general" fora where any political or social topic may be raised; fora for government officials and experts; closed fora aimed to allow and promote discussion among politicians.
Citizens' electronic discussion fora are usually moderated by one of the organisers. This moderation, applied to maintain consistency with the topic, to avoid "flame-wars" and extremism, may limit the freedom of some citizens to present their view or inhibit others from contributing. It seems that the themes or issues selected for discussion have often been selected by the organisers too. But some projects state that citizens may put forward topics for a new e-forum themselves. Until now, these projects must be regarded as experimental or as demonstrations that participation can be improved. Citizens (unless they are willing and able to set up their own Internet server and forum/ conference system) have no formal right to demand a public debate on a particular issue. Also there is no direct political effect of the discussions or of their conclusions. (This may lead to rejection of the offer to participate.) Some politicians may listen or join in, so could possibly be influenced by the input of "voters", but they are not obliged to act according to the results of the citizens' deliberations.
The pioneering efforts (described above. 3.4, 3.5) of the Reform Party of Canada, their voters and constituents, show two important possibilities here. Firstly, that during a legislature period and on specific issues (not only in a short period before elections) political delegates can learn and act on the views of a representative group of their constituents. Secondly, that with the aid of modern techniques, all members of an electoral constituency can be consulted, may vote on an issue or proposed law, and this vote may direct the delegate in parliament.
Town meeting projects, citizens' jury and panel projects illustrate that some change towards direct democracy may - in theory at least - be achieved with and without the aid of ICT. Of course, in striving for direct democracy while trying to allow citizens of a large constituency to communicate and indeed participate in meaningful and effective ways then some problems will be encountered and objections raised. All citizens of the constituency (e.g. San Francisco) cannot at all easily be involved in a single debate so various models have been conceived in order to have a workable number of participants, some with representative sampling. Already then the principle of direct democracy is being "watered down", as only a small percentage of constituents (a "sample") may participate. In large scale "electronic town, state or national meetings" public opinion sampling techniques have been used. However, assuming even that a "scientifically" representative sample of citizens is obtained, there are various objections which will still be raised by critics of this type of project. For instance, citizens who were not selected and invited to participate in the ETM may complain that they were not represented. They may well not be too impressed by arguments about scientific sampling. Others may not wish be bothered with details of public affairs and assert that they would prefer a system (well known) in which the delegate for whom they had voted in an election should decide vicariously for them. Another criticism is that in the ETM and similar models to date, there has not been enough information supplied nor enough time allowed, e.g. during a television programe, for citizens to make an informed decision about how to vote on the selected issue.
The older projects, generally using little or no ICT, which may be described as rehearsals for improved democracy, are less susceptible to criticism about lack of information and deliberation (see Jefferson Center programme, 3.7 above). They allow citizens to deliberate thoroughly on public issues before reaching a decision or making recommendations on public policy. (These projects use several models. Participants may be e.g. citizens' juries, relatively small groups of usually less than 25 roughly "representative" citizens. Or, panels of citizens which may be large and representative of a state or country may be selected. The projects vary in the degree to which the participants are asked to study the selected topic or "issue", the amount and type of debate, the time taken for the whole procedure, the type of decision procedure (e.g. majority voting or attempting consensus), and in the application or use of the results of the deliberations (e.g. for press reports, or to directly lobby politicians, or for academic analysis).
Elements of these methods, ETMs, citizens' panels and juries, in a very limited way, have begun to be applied, mainly experimentally, in "real" politics. e.g. during 1995 vice-president Al Gore took part in a large scale electronic debate with built-in feed-back to allow opinion of participants to be repeatedly gauged during the proceedings. (Hurwitz and Mallery 1995). Hage refers to a recent National Electronic Town Hall Meeting (in which "the e-lists and WWW servers quickly overloaded, while the "alt" newsgroup access worked fine")(Hage 1996). Also see the Reform Party of Canada projects, described above. ICT developments can theoretically allow many of the forms of selective information, participation in debate and decision-making (or formulation of recommendations) which are illustrated in this paper to be offered to large groups of citizens who may be geographically dispersed.
For an overview of participation and "rehearsal for democracy" models see Mark Robbins' recent electronic paper (Robbins 1996).
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