Discussants* in OPEN FORUM's general and development space
include:
 

Jan van der Sluis works for the Netherlands Institute for Care and Welfare and cooperates in Dutch government projects. He wrote 1997 "I am currently looking for information on _supporting computersystems_. What I mean by this are computersystems that are capable of supporting citizens to decide on actions to take, to obtain information, and so on. So, I am looking for expert systems which guide people while obtaining (information on) their right on benefits. Or, systems that provide information on laws and its interpretations. Or, geographical information systems that provide for instance information on housing for elderly. In short, I am trying to establish some sort of overview of these kind of applications, in The Netherlands and abroad."

Mark Randell has responsibility for citizen participation in the City of Fremantle, Western Australia. He has previously worked for IBM and others in the computer industry, and taught Cognitive Science on the Faculty of
Psychology of the University of Western Australia. He also runs the City of Fremantle's public discussion forum at http://www.discussion.fremantle.wa.gov.au

Jiri Polak is a Czech political scientist living in Sweden who was one of the founders, with Miroslav Kolar, George Sagi and others, of the World Movement for Direct Democracy. He is editor of the group's (paper) newsletter.

Tomas Ohlin is the Swedish nestor of teledemocracy. He wrote a prophetic paper about computer networks and political participation in the early 1970s.

Michael Macpherson "My background is in medicine and inter-disciplinary science. In the early 1980s in Britain I co-founded an association of health workers for social responsibility and in 1985, in Berlin FRG, initiated the interdisciplinary project Psycho-Social and Medical Research. Integral Studies is the new development programme of PSAMRA, which ventures into political fields of study, taking especially a perspective of the citizen. More about PSAMRA/Integral Studies and some fairly recent writing may be found via http://home.snafu.de/mjm/init.html"

Richard Lockwood introduces himself: "... My interest in community building and citizenship is twofold. Firstly my city is currently the only one in our State which has developed small geographical precincts as a vehicle for active involvement of local citizens in decision making. Generally the people of this city are aware and vocal over most issues, so governments are on their toes. Fortunately our Council has nurtured  this new system and so far it is working. My second reason is that I have a long interest in disability issues as an author, teacher  (University of Western Australia) and advocate for people with disabilities. ..."

Horst Kremers works for the Berlin city-state government, is an "Informatiker" (computer scientist) who works on data systems for environmental issues and is a leader of their Agenda21 environmental, social and economic programme (following the Rio declaration of 1992). His special topics in Agenda 21:  Participation; The role of local and state parliaments and the role of administration; Practical aspects of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Horst_Kremers/

Andrzej Dariusz Kaczmarczyk is based in Warsaw, Poland, having worked as a university professor in Mexico during the 1980s. He is a scientist in a research institute, information technology educator and is concerned to promote electronic democracy and direct democracy. In Poland he finds very few like-minded people. His views on cyberdemocracy may be found at http://www.imm.org.pl/mat/ACybdemA.html and a biographical sketch in Marquis "Who's Who in the World" 16th Edition 1999.

Bruce Eggum is a citizen of Wisconsin, USA, who is concerned about global and local problems in e.g. natural environment, civil rights, and who has founded a regional, county-based on-line political forum http://eggyy.tripod.com/

Roxana Bojariu works for the Romanian National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in Bucharest. She is a physicist who has carried out climate variability and predictability studies for the Atlantic/European area, also interested in interdisciplinary approaches related to the development of an individual-friendly society based on ICT. Together with others, she has been involved in the Ciberplai webring initiative. Ciberplai aims to contribute to a "grass-roots" movement acting to syncronize Romania with the post-industrial democracies. http://bojariu.tripod.com/ciberplai.htm

Dave Blair <mail@dave-blair.de> does freelance translation/English teaching in Halle, Germany, He writes: "... I am from the minarchist camp, meaning that, while the citizens should be involved in decision making as far as this is necessary, the resources of government/special interest groups should be constitutionally limited vis-à-vis economic and social policy. However, I would not classify myself as a "hard-line" libertarian. I have some ideas for a constitutional model specifically defining and limiting the scope of the legislature/executive and judiciary ..."

Jean-Paul Baquiast <jpbaquiast@compuserve.com> runs an exciting on-line project "ADMIROUTES" http://www.admiroutes.asso.fr/. He writes: "Admiroutes s'est jusqu'ici principalement intéressée à l'étude des apports d'Internet à la modernisation des administrations." One of his papers "Internet, démocratie politique, démocratie directe: Accueil" may be found at
http://www.admiroutes.asso.fr/action/theme/democratie/accueil.htm

* Note: Missing e-mail addresses may be found at http://www.egroups.com/group/citizen-policy/