So, I returned to the past, but why? William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute visited Helsinki to make observations about his new article on research-centered computational networks. However, what I thought to be more interesting was the difference he made on networked institutions and networked individuals.

The more Internet orientated social scientists had a meeting before Dutton gave his presentation, and we went trough what we study and how the OII functions. Dutton made an observation that in e-democracy field research tends to focus on networked institutions.

With networked institutions, Dutton meant maintaining and empowering the existing structures with the capabilities of computer networks. An example of this might be the university, which maintains its academic status by creating institutional support services, such as blogs, document repositories, …

However, as I understood it, Dutton’s argument was that information and communication technology could go further and redistribute the power currently held in the structures. As the Web enables one to publish and collaborate without the middleman, Dutton’s idea is that individuals should be studied as part of the networking society too.

In terms of e-democracy research, some terms already cover these topics. New social movement is the most obvious for me: it studies how humans group together and act on a common cause, but they are not organized as an institution. Concept ‘reflective action’ can also be used to describe the phenomena: reflective actors use network technology to advocate their agenda. However, as Dutton observed, lots of effort goes to understanding and prototyping the use of technology for institutions, the existing structures – not focusing on re-inventing new systems that could allow more direct responsibility.

This is just one sample of the structure vs. agency-fight, ongoing in the social sciences. And, as in most cases, this is not a black-white question; rather there are grey colors too. So, both of these views of the world have explanatory powers, and in the best case they should be used together to create a more complete picture. And the presentation was a good reminder for me of the methodology lecture I had totally forgotten.

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…

So, about the background of the problem: every voter who wanted to participate into this pilot had their ballot in electronic form, something similar to credit card. One should put this card to selection machine; then one needs to select the candidate with numerical input and press ok to confirm this choice. Many people have missed the part of pressing ok, causing the electronic card be blanco.

This is just design of the workflow in the application, not even related to user interface. You can verify a good solution while visiting your ATM. At least here Finland it first gives out your card and after that your money — guess why in that order?

So, what has been the reaction? Our ministery of justice stated

Osoittautui, että järjestelmä ei ole ollut se ongelma, vaan sittenkin ihminen. (source: Helsingin Sanomat)

Which can be freely translated: “It became clear that the system was not the problem, but it was human after all.” Remind me of the HAL 9000 and famous “It can only be attributable to human error.” So what goes here wrong?

The users needs are not understood and this causes poor experience and in this case failure of the system, even thought it might technically be reliable it really don’t matter. What matters is that the user is not lost; what ever hack there’s in the engine — but always assume that user can do things differently.

The question is that what is the next step of governmental services in this forward going society. Actually this is the first thing that usually gets me worried: sometimes we push some values and assumptions so much that we don’t stop to think enough if they are needed by the users. In our case the user, citizen, needs some things but…  I’ve experienced some e-governance works in Finland that were done — actually rather well — but still haven’t flight so well. But during the online discussion I got the image that e-governance services are (thought to) provide transparency in the governance and this transparency is something that’s needed. As I don’t know the local environment of developing countries, I just need to believe.

But then to actual content of the session, which I think is relevant to most developed countries also. Mr. Randeep Sudan spoke many wise words about data interoperability and ability to mash data up. Clear, these services are getting more and more popular in internet services so they should enter the governmental services also. Actually, ability to mash up governance data sounds like a good place to have new innovative services.

As I have my background, I like the mentions of contextual as being one of those things that may allow new ways to interact between citizens and government. What if instead of pulling information of decisions you would get them pushed towards you? Or how could mashing things up with contextual data modify your daily interaction with society? I see hge potential but also huge risks here — and I actually might start working with these kind of questions if Tekes provides some funding for a project. Mr. Sudan also notified how important the mobile services are; this is rather clear as for developing countries — mobile device is de facto internet device.

Mr. Anthony Williams continues with the theme of data interoperability. He used interesting term “broadcast model of politics” — governments should be able to share the information as well as they could and this would generate transparency. This would also help with the changing technical environments, as governmental organizations usually aren’t in the cutting edge of ICT. But then there’s some down sides also: what about privacy? How should we position the privacy against freedom of information? And more — what kind of solution do we need to secure everyones private information. For the latter, we see that even big countries like the Great Britain has a some room for improvement — so is there any way to do this right in the first place?

As always, a bit more questions arise:

• Digital dive and the solutions for that?
• Who develops and maintains these services?
• And how to take care, using Mr. Williams terms: the end result is “gitizen centric goverment” and not just a bunch of services no-one uses?