e-Democracy: The experience of Barcelona

Joan Clos, Mayor of Barcelona

Issue: ICTs offer enormous possibilities for the modernization of public administration and new ways of addressing well-identified challenges in service delivery and transactions with citizens. e-Democracy is one of the new ways of interacting with the public, and aims at broadening citizen participation and making decision-making processes clearer to citizens. It thus goes beyond the simple creation of online forums, portals or voting tools to encompass the idea of genuine participative democracy.

Relevance: Effective e-Democracy arises from the synergy of new technologies and new concepts of public participation. However, both ICTs and citizen participation can tend to be inward looking and concentrate on developing their separate domains. The challenge is to get both staying close to each other and through collaborative working, continue to develop a joint strategy for the emergence of a real culture of e-Democracy, which will inevitably imply serious consideration to issues of equal access, usability and security as far as new technologies are concerned.

The new information and communication technologies allow us to conceive and develop new tools and strategies. These tools will be able to extend citizen participation and help elaborate and clarify the decision-making processes within public administration and deliberating assemblies for citizens. This phenomenon has been captured by the term of e-Democracy. Unlike existing initiatives allowing citizens to complete online administrative procedures, e-Democracy goes beyond the provision of online services and supplements the technological advances it represents by creating the opportunity to link representative and participative democracy.

e-Democracy means more than translating traditional participation activities on to the Internet, it also initiates a genuine rethink of the extent to which the public is able to take part in the decision-taking process. In Barcelona we have had decades of participation experience cutting across national boundaries and political philosophies. Public leaders have become increasingly committed to the value of participation by citizens and they have been engaged in a search for the tools to do so effectively. e-Democracy is one of these tools and therefore aims at combining online technology with advanced software systems and platforms to foster participation culture, citizen initiatives, and public opinion consultation.

Discussion forums and community portals that were first used for networking among university researchers, have been successfully appropriated by citizens for all kinds of private and professional uses. The spread of this kind of use has had a huge impact on the way people relate to each other and work together and has led to the change in the development of the Internet from the direction it was originally created for. It is now our role, as cities and policy-makers, to allow this strength to positively benefit the field of citizen participation and to build rich environments where citizens can express their opinion about social processes, politicians, actions or social movements. The idea is not to add yet another electronic window for citizens and we certainly need to place a high priority on ensuring usability and compelling content throughout the development phase. This is all the more important for an e-Democracy as citizen participation is far from being commonplace and developing a system that engages the citizen is our main challenge.

As far as politicians are concerned, the implementation of e-Democracy will require a significant commitment to offering and encouraging the opening of free online forums following citizens and communities' initiatives. In addition they must be prepared to listen and interact through them. It is crucial to demonstrate that the real intention is to recognize that inputs and ideas from citizens themselves are needed to address complex social problems successfully.

Whatever the case, we should welcome and plan ahead for the "Second generation" Internet and not miss the opportunities it will give us to tackle some of our current challenges. As well as taking advantage of better quality-of-service, which will seek to guarantee quality of data transfer and thus open up a wide field of possibilities for real-time and multimedia online discussions and forums, we need to keep abreast of the research and development carried out in the fields of web data extraction tools and digital libraries, and think about the applications most suited to our activities. The need is now for creativity because here the technology is ahead of ideas of how to use it effectively. Developments in network collaboration, online databases and statistical tools for Web-based analysis and data extraction will become important information analysis resources and should hopefully meet our needs but their effective use is dependent not on the tools themselves but how we utilize them in the policy-making process. Only with an effective understanding of this aspect, can we hope that these technologies will be able to help decision-makers to analyse public opinion in a way that a large amount of opinions can be reached and a common consensus achieved.

Specification of virtual debates compared to real-life ones is also another of the current key issue of research on e-Democracy and we will need to conduct research and experiments to observe and clearly identify the possible impacts of such processes.

Surveys and public opinion polls are the traditional means of forming the link between citizens and policy-makers and it is not new to say that Internet is capable of extending their benefits. Through the Internet indeed, online polling and survey tools provide the means of reaching greater numbers of citizens, far more than could be interviewed face-to-face or by classical mailing and phoning, and this also leads to cost benefits. Moreover, their efficiency lies in their discretion and in the short time investment required.

For online voting and referendums, the savings in terms of time and costs are similar but the process forces us to approach specific characteristics of the voting process in question carefully. The use of secure data transfer technology is required to guarantee the privacy and security of personal information.

In this context, the EUROCITI pilot project was completed in Barcelona in August 2002 and the trial carried out on secure online voting and referendums universally revealed an optimistic assessment of progress for the immediate future. It demonstrated that Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is able to support digital signatures and certificates satisfactorily and enables strong security protocols. Now the priority for us is to participate in the definition of a common framework and regulations and to cooperate with all levels of European, national, regional and local authorities in order to ensure interoperability of products. Without this level of cooperation online voting and referendum applications are not possible and the investment may not be as sustainable and efficient as it should be. There is an urgent need, therefore, to create a precise legal framework that could be flexible enough to keep up with the ongoing march of technology.

Going a step further into the participation process, e-Democracy also addresses a new political trend towards empowering citizens and communities by allowing them to participate directly in decision-making and projects (which may or may not form part of the provisions of existing legal frameworks). The use of ICT is significant here. Deliberative systems offer unlimited possibilities for citizens to discuss -simultaneously or otherwise- concrete issues dealing, for example, with city planning or mobility. As an example of a background tool, an application enabling citizens to design or modify an architectural project, automatically learning from the effects that these changes have on the city, could enhance citizen's awareness of the potential of ICTs and public management issues. Here citizens not only give their opinion on a specific project or policy but are able to participate with full knowledge of the consequences of their decisions. The effective implementation and the common use of such systems requires adjustments in the decision-making process. Close collaboration on research between government departments, the private sector and universities will hopefully lead to the development of suitable tools. It will also remain important thereafter to keep citizens updated on the repercussion of the common actions and decisions to generate confidence and consolidate practices. Providing information on the impact participation has had could thus ideally accompany the development of deliberative tools/systems, and each would profit from equal visibility.

Spreading e-Democracy thus largely requires changing the public organization from bureaucratic to collaborative style, and demands constant efforts to orient Internet technology research so that future technological development can meet the needs of citizens and public administrations.

The reasons and benefits of reinforced participation are clear. Productivity is increased as barriers are removed and citizens' ideas are taken into account. Cost reductions are achieved through greater efficiency, and the quality of public products and services can be enhanced by feedback from citizens. There is still a lot to do but we need to go from the concept of public services being delivered to citizens, to public services being provided in conjunction with citizens. Step by step, e-Democracy may make possible the goal of reaching decision making after a legally organized deliberative procedure by means of creating the link between formal representative democracy and participative democracy.

These aspirations for a new form of democratic participation are wonderful but depend on the level and quality of Internet access among citizens. If democracy is a system in which each member of an entity or organization is entitled to vote and participate in decisions, e-Democracy should be further qualified by its prefix e. And with respect the first definition, the prefix which represents the Internet should be itself accessible to all. Here accessibility includes different meanings.

First, the challenge consists of preventing the digital divide from excluding people who would most benefit from being more involved in public management. In view of the World Summit on Information Society next December in Geneva, TeleCities, the major European network of cities committed to leadership in the Information and Knowledge Society chaired by the city of Barcelona, will present the "Team Charter of Rights and Essential Public Services for European Citizens regarding the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)". The initiative arises from the observation that although the digital divide is still in a state of flux, the growing presence of basic services on the Internet (and the likelihood of an even greater presence in the future) means a position needs to be taken. The Charter seeks to set out the precepts that should define the framework in which all members of society must be able to use the Internet and ICT in general and therefore benefit from equal opportunities in the Information Society. Nevertheless, in order for a statement of rights to be credible it must translate into clear commitments. This is also the aim of the Charter: specify a range of public services conceived as the basis for effective general use of ICT in our cities, and thus define them as essential services.

The strategy to extend e-Democracy services should target specific locations which are close to citizens and have some capacity to develop resources and educate users of all ages. Here the interest lies in the fact that such locations can easily generate and spread an e-Democracy culture by, for example, organizing workshops, public events, training sessions, awareness campaigns or even competitions on Internet practices among a wide range of citizens. Internet access should thus be spread among sites accessible to the audience that each location presupposes. Public spaces like schools, libraries, community centres, and of course, city councils are likely to be in pole position as e-Democracy culture "generators".

Consequently, user interfaces should be as plentiful as possible to adapt to the diversity of potential uses and users ranging from communities, individual citizens to disabled people, leaders, or young people, etc. And especially for the socially disadvantaged and disabled, more training campaigns could also be undertaken and functions should be as close as possible to the effective requirements of all the actors involved.

The same applies to content management. Efforts should be made to ensure that information is clear and fully comprehensible to its audience. For each type of online application, information handling, and the mode in which it is presented and made available will be decisive. In particular, differences between administrative jargon and the everyday languages of citizens and communities will be considered as important as presentation in order to facilitate communication.

A number of public administrations, similar to that of the city of Barcelona, have already begun working on e-Democracy applications. Many of them are engaged in re-engineering processes, which are advancing more slowly due to the complexity of putting them into practice but prove the consideration of the need for adapting the Public Administration process to the integration of participating process. Hopefully, all initiatives -pioneering or not- carried out in this field, could be shared among all the cities during numerous meetings end events so that the voice of a new standard in public participation and engagement will be heard. Furthermore, through perseverance and cooperation between all of the ongoing common undertakings on e-Democracy, we can hopefully together enable the design of a common framework to validate e-Democracy processes.

e-Democracy, participative democracy, online voting, communities portal, EUROCITI

Joan Clos, TeleCities Presidency

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• Joan Clos has been mayor of Barcelona since 1997. He also holds international posts related to urban policy. He is president of the Advisory Committee UNACLA, president of Metropolis and TeleCities and member of the Committee of the Regions of the European Union. He is vice president of CMRE, vice president of UTO and a member of the Executive Committee of IULA.