Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree
Magister Technologiae: Information Technology
in the Faculty of Informatics and Design
at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2013

http://etd.cput.ac.za/bitstream/20.500.11838/1375/1/208128980_BaguI_l_MTech_IT_fid_2013

Public participation in government: the place of e-participation in the City of Cape Town-Western Cape

This thesis aims at looking into whether democratic processes and deliberative policy discussion can take place online. In addition by using a grounded theory approach this thesis aims at expanding the current theories on how online public policy discussions work. As fears have been raised over decreasing citizen participation in political processes which then again can cause problems of accountability and legitimacy there have been attempts to find new and more deliberative ways to engage the citizens in the democratic decision making. This need for new places of policy discussion accompanied with the huge leaps in information and communications technologies have also resulted in attempts to bring policy discussions online. This thesis analyses the case of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda online engagement platform and how one of the ten discussion groups on the platform facilitated public policy deliberation. The methodological approach in this study is grounded theory and the tool used for the analysis is qualitative content analysis. The results of this thesis firstly give inputs regarding how policy discussions take place online and secondly raises some concerns over the actual deliberativeness of the online discussion on the platform. These results however should not be seen as diminishing the power of Internet as a tool for crowdsourcing the public opinion, in which the case of this study succeeded very well. In the light of this case, the online public policy discussions could therefore act as an additional tool in democratic processes.

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Discussing Public Policy Online The case of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda Assembly 2012 online platform

In a series of our earlier papers [1-4] we have developed a concept and a model of large-scale online deliberation, which could accommodate any number of participants who deliberate on a given issue altogether as one undivided body, in one common "virtual room", rather than divided into several small groups This approach indeed requires a rather specific procedural framework, and an ICT-system to support and enforce those procedures It provides for a meaningful participation of any size, open to any citizen in a given constituency, therefore preserving their equal political rights Rights, however, do not imply capabilities; a person may be authorized to do something, but not being able of doing that thing Both the representative model and the referendum-based direct model of democratic governance provide every citizen with a very basic right---that of casting their vote This basic right is indeed inclusive, for, the act of voting can be performed even by the least prepared and least capable person; yet, one can ask how meaningful is the act of such an unprepared vote The deliberative model, in contrast, is rather demanding; it requires from those who decide to participate in a deliberation a high level of factual preparedness and of argumentative and rhetoric capabilities It is somehow elitist, in comparison with eg the representative model A question therefore remains---can we make our deliberative model inclusive, and what this inclusiveness should mean with regard to different levels of personal capabilities?In this paper, we are trying to answer these two questions We discuss and compare various causes of non-participation, and also various levels of involvement in a deliberative participation We argue that, regarding such a demanding activity as is political deliberation, trying to achieve equal and uniform inclusion makes no sense Instead, inclusiveness should be understood as providing every individual with as much possibilities and help, as he/she is capable and willing to make use of Providing help to those who are willing to deliberate (on a given issue) but are not capable enough is indeed a much more difficult task than simply providing everybody with equal procedural possibilities To this end, we introduce a mechanism of argumentative facilitation, through a voluntary aid, brought by more (rhetorically and argumentatively)capable participants to their less capable peers We expect that our method will provide not only for increased inclusiveness of participation in online deliberation, but also for complementing online deliberation by expanding it offline at the "last mile", with small face-to-face groups connected to the main online community through one or more group facilitators, or coaches

Can Deliberative Governance Become Inclusive

In this Part II of the present Chapter, we describe the stages (or phases), mechanisms and procedures of a MOD process, in accordance with the requirements set forth in Section “ MOD Paradigm Versus Deliberative Polling” of Part I. Our task is to provide an MOD blueprint for an ICT-based MOD platform that almost immediately lends itself to system implementation. As in Part I, we use the neologism deliberandum to refer to a given instance of mass online deliberation, that is, to a process of deliberating online within a given community, on a given issue, and within a given period of time.

Mass Online Deliberation in Participatory Policy-Making—Part II

We present an online deliberation system using mutual evaluation in order to collaboratively develop solutions. Participants submit their proposals and evaluate each other's proposals; some of them may then be invited by the system to rewrite 'problematic' proposals. Two cases are discussed: a proposal supported by many, but not by a given person, who is then invited to rewrite it for making yet more acceptable; and a poorly presented but presumably interesting proposal. The first of these cases has been successfully implemented. Proposals are evaluated along two axes-understandability (or clarity, or, more generally, quality), and agreement. The latter is used by the system to cluster proposals according to their ideas, while the former is used both to present the best proposals on top of their clusters, and to find poorly written proposals candidates for rewriting. These functionalities may be considered as important components of a large scale online deliberation system.

System-Generated Requests for Rewriting Proposals.

In this paper we introduce our model of self-regulated mass online deliberation, and apply it to a context of cross-border deliberation involving translation of contributions between participating languages, and then to a context of cross-community online deliberation for dispute resolution, e.g. between opposing ethnic or religious communities. In such a cross-border or cross-community context, online deliberation should preferably progress as a sequence of segmented phases each followed by a combining phase. In a segmented phase, each community deliberates separately, and selects their best contributions for being presented to all other communities. Selection is made by using our proposed mechanism of mutual moderation and appraisal of contributions by participants themselves. In the subsequent combining phase, the selected contributions are translated (by volunteering or randomly selected participants among those who have specified appropriate language skills) and presented to target segments for further appraisal and commenting. Our arguments in support of the proposed mutual moderation and appraisal procedures remain mostly speculative, as the whole subject of mass online self-regulatory deliberation still remains largely unexplored, and there exist no practical realisation of it .

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Cyril Velikanov

Papers

Procedures and Methods for Cross-community Online Deliberation