Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government

Call for Papers

During the last 10 years, the world has focused on social media and the new forms of societal behaviour, including content generation, collaboration and sharing as well as network organisation. These behaviours and expectations, in particular transparency and access to data, new ways of interacting with government and democratic institutions will continue to develop, and profound changes in society are to be expected. Society has been confronted with “Open Government”, “Open Data” and “Open Access”. What have the experiences been so far? How do these impact society, democratic structures and organisations? What changes occur at citizen level? What are the implications for democracy, society, science and business?


CeDEM11 presents the following tracks, which focus on these important changes:


Track: E-participation
Co-chairs: Julia Glidden (21c Consultancy, London, UK), Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute, DK) and Norbert Kersting (Stellenbosch University, ZA)

• Transparency & Communication: freedom of information, open access, openness, information sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks, data visualization, e-learning, e-empowering etc. ;
• Participation & Collaboration: online communities, innovation, bottom-up, top-down, social media, social networks, engagement and accountability, generation of content and knowledge, collaborative culture, collaboration between C2C, G2C, etc. ;
• Sustainability of e-participation;
• Different perspectives: citizens, government, NGOs, NPOs, practitioners, service providers.


Track: Open Government
Co-chairs: Philipp Müller (University of Salzburg, Business School, AT) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, AUS)

• Open government initiatives;
• Architecture, Concepts & Effects: access and openness, user generated content, peer production, network effects, power laws, long tail, harnessing the power of the crowd, crowd sourcing, social web, semantic web, etc. ;
• Open Data: possibilities, limitations;
• Open Access: implications of open access for citizens, governments, research and universities;
• Citizen engagement: participation, value and measurement;
• Crowdsourcing for government.


Track: E-voting
Co-chairs: Melanie Volkamer (Technical University Darmstadt, DE) and Thad Hall (University of Utah, USA)

• Discussion of all forms of electronic voting: including but not limited to polling station, kiosk or remote voting by electronic means;
• Formulation of the interdisciplinary issues involved: technology, law, politics and society in designing and implementing e-voting;
• Presentation of new ways for solving the voting paradigm of unequivocal identification of the voter and full anonymity of the vote;
• Report on implementations, their legal, organisational and technical framework, the project experience made, and future trends;
• Analysis of the interrelationship with and the effects of e-voting on democratic institutions and processes as well as voter behaviour;
• Conducting social and political analysis of the effects of electronic voting;
• Report on practical experience in implementing and conducting elections with electronic voting parts;
• Discussion of security requirements and testing in accordance to international security standards i.e. Common Criteria or ITSEC;
• Evaluation of e-voting: the effects of it and how to evaluate experiments.


Track: Open Data and Open Access
Co-chair: Andy Williamson (Hansard Society, London, UK)

• Licence issues;
• Technical frameworks of open data;
• Open data and mashing platforms;
• Cost and benefits of open data provision;
• Open data formats and API's;
• Principles and good practice of open data;
• The role of scholarly communication and e-democracy;
• The impact of Open Access and transparency on e-participation;
• Political and legal issues of Open Access;
• Open Access and crowdsourcing.
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Deadline for the submission of papers and workshop proposals: 1 December 2010