Science and Industry

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I just send a reviewed version of my article on online citizen participation to Hallinnon tutkimus, a journal magazine of administrative study. The article is only in Finnish (and, due to copyright I won’t post it here in full anyway), but I summarize the key findings.

First, about the method. I had conducted six expert interviews in public administration — not a big number, actually hilariously tiny, but that’s something that’s in the nature of qualitative data. The idea is to understand in more deeper way, and with deeper understanding it’s hard to get big n’s. But, what I was heading to understand? I wanted to look online citizen participation from a bit different angle: instead of highlighting citizens and focusing on their needs and wishes, I wanted to understand more on administration, the executive branch that is as vital as citizens in successful participation. There seems to be lack of understanding this area, highlighted e.g. by Matikainen et al. (2008).

So, these six interviews are my way to understand what’s going on in administration, what’s helping them and what’s stopping them from more participatory approach. For this I use actantial model, method focusing on understanding the different actors in text.

Some observations based on this framework. Firstly, the problems (opponents) were not surprise to most of us: time and resources. However, there’s also more deeper problems, such as lack of ICT skills and process problems.

Secondly,  the supportive mechanism (helpers) was just workshops, steering groups and committees - the interviews don’t actually provide additional insight in here, especially when speaking on cultural changes. However, enormous amounts of research indicate, that organizations are able to adapt to new situations — it just may take some time.

Lastly, the reason why citizen participation is important (senders) is not clearly articulated. Actually, in most e-democracy research the normative background, the why question, is not well answered, but as natural to normative argumentation, there’s not right answer, there is just several different kind. In this research, the reason why administration should be more participatory was said to be general opinion, which usually means something totally different.

So, that was the article in short summary, let’s wait when it gets out from press…

Apps for Democracy-competition¹ will be held here in Finland during the Mindtrek Conference 2009. The rules etc. are still open, but the deadline is decided: 31 August. So, whole summer time for development.

The idea of this competition is to create same sort of buzz that the DC version and UK version created. It is cool, that goverment is pushing their data open and allowing creation of mashups based on their data. This is the right way to move on, using ICT to create a better place for some people.

My 2 cents on this topic are rather simple: remember mobility and context. Mobility allows you to use the application casually, on the way to work² . Contextuality will make the mobile application much smarter than what it would be usually. Let’s see if I manage to write some application to the competition my self.

1. I don’t think that is a good name for the competition, as apps usually crated are not related to political processes, like democracy, but just visualization of existing data in new ways [↩]
2. But, you should still have a desktop version of the application there… [↩]