International Conference

Online Consultation and Public Policy Making: Democracy, Identity, and New Media

Friday, March 14, 2008
Barrister Club, Moritz College of Law
25 W. 11th Ave., Columbus, OH 43201

Organizers
Overview
Principal Participants
Conference Schedule
Sponsors

If you would like to attend any part of this conference, please reserve your seat by contacting Adrienne Montalvo, Executive Editor of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, at is@osu.edu by March 12, 2008. Please indicate whether you would like to reserve a lunch.

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Organizers
Peter Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law, Moritz College of Law
Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, Director of Research, Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds

Overview
The Internet now offers the world an unprecedented capacity to foster the sharing of information and to facilitate sustained, many-to-many communication. The networking of citizens with their governments, with each other, and with the organs of civil society has created unprecedented opportunities for popular engagement in the public sphere.

The International Conference on Online Consultation and Public Policy Making: Democracy, Identity, and New Media will feature researchers from Australia, England, France, Israel, Italy, Korea and Slovenia, as well as the United States, addressing a variety of e-democracy issues from a diverse interdisciplinary background and both theoretical and applied research.

This is an active workshop in which members of the International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policy Making will both present and discuss the principal papers. Audience members, including students, are welcome, but reservations to attend must be made in advance.

Principal Participants
Steven J. Balla, Associate Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Public Administration, and International Affairs, and Research Associate, The George Washington Institute of Public Policy, is a political scientist whose work focuses broadly on public involvement in administrative rule making in the United States.  He studies rule making processes empirically to ascertain the impacts of new technologies on who participates in policy making processes, and the impacts of these technologies and this participation on the composition and behavior of government institutions. 

Patrizia Bertini is an independent practitioner and researcher with the European Internet Accessibility Observatory, a European project funded by the EU-Commission under the 6th Framework Programme's strategic objective of “e-inclusion.”   She holds her university degree in socio-linguistics, but has devoted her professional life to dealing with technical issues regarding website development, design and usability.  The focus of her work is design for disability access, not only in the context of the Internet, but also interactive digital television.  Her current work focuses on accessibility policies and metrics and user interface development.

Andrew Chadwick is Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations and Founding Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. His latest book is Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies (Oxford University Press, 2006), which won the American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies Section Outstanding Book Award for 2007. He is co-editor (with Philip N. Howard) of The Handbook of Internet Politics (Routledge, in press). His work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including Political Studies, Governance, Political Communication, The Journal of Political Ideologies, Information, Communication and Society, and Social Science Computer Review. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 2003-04, and his research has been supported by the European Commission, the Parliament of Canada and the Leverhulme Trust. Chadwick is a founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. The New Political Communication Unit website can be found at: http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk.

Sungsoo Hwang, is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and a Research Assistant for the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is currently studying the governance across the United States of Neighborhood Information Systems (NIS), that is, hybrid applications of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and other web technologies that provide demographic, social, and economic information to community stakeholders.  He is especially interested in how such systems affect the magnitude and quality of citizen interaction with government.  His other research in progress, in collaboration with Seok Jin Lew at Sogang University in Seoul, is examining how the Internet is transforming the legislative process of Korea, focusing on how members of Korean Assembly are connecting to citizens through the members' websites.

Laurence Monnoyer-Smith, Associate Professor, Communication Sciences, University of Technology at Compiègne, France, is an information scientist who has been studying online consultation procedures for the past eight years.  She has evaluated new public consultation procedures for the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris (CRNS), a study she updated within the context of an international study financed by the European Parliament.  Again with CNRS, she has researched e-voting and deliberative platform tools for the European Commission, benchmarking such initiatives in both Europe and the United States.  Among many themes, her work focuses on the adaptation by different cultures to different participative systems and how they fit within various legal and normative frames.  She has also done research comparing online and face-to-face deliberations. 

Kerrie Oakes is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Administration at Griffith University, who formerly worked as a policy officer for the Queensland Government eDemocracy Policy Team in Brisbane.  Her research focuses on the impacts of e-democratic practice on the role, activities, and organization of the public sector.  Specifically, for Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, she plans to use online discussions, face-to-face focus groups, individual interviews, and surveys to determine whether and how e-democracy is affecting public officials' perceptions of government's role in achieving accountability, representation, relationship development and trust. 

Oren Perez, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, holds his first law degree from the University of Tel Aviv and his doctorate in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  An expert on both environmental and international trade law, he has written about the implications of global legal pluralism for addressing transnational conflicts in environmental and public health policy.  He has also written about the capacity of ICTs to facilitate innovative structures of political decision making in highly pluralistic decision making environments. Perez is especially interested in the challenge of global governance and in the dissonance between the transfer of powers from the national to transnational levels on the one hand, and the lack of democratic mechanisms on the international level on the other.  His work examines whether e-participation can be used to resolve this dissonance, setting this exploration against the general problematic of collective action.  He has also worked on practical projects involving online consultation and e-governance through the Bar-Ilan Environmental Clinic, which he founded and directs. 

Alicia Schatteman, a Ph.D. candidate in Public Administration at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, works also as Communications Director for the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers. A Canadian citizen, she is studying the possibilities of online methods to involve citizens and inform citizens of public performance measurements at the local government level. She seeks to assess the utility of such initiatives for increasing citizen involvement and government accountability and transparency.

Conference Schedule
8:15-8:45 a.m. Registration and continental breakfast

8:45-9 a.m. Welcome, Peter Shane and Stephen Coleman

9-10:15 a.m.
Andrew Chadwick, "Web 2.0: New Challenges for E-Democracy"
Patrizia Bertini, "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You Are Citizen Kane: Identity, Anonymity and Pseudonymity of E-Citizenship"

10:30-11:45 a.m.
Laurence Monnoyer-Smith, "Technology and Inclusion: Framing Online Public Debate to Enlarge Participation"
Oren Perez, "Complexity, Information Overload and Online Deliberation"

12-1:30 p.m. Lunch Speaker
Tim Erickson, Forum Development Director, e-democracy.org, “Building Democracy Through Local Issues Forums”

1:45-3 p.m.
Steven Balla, "The Diffusion of E-Government Innovations Across U.S. Municipalities"
Sungsoo Hwang, "Advancing E-Governance at the Community Level with the Neighborhood Information System"

3:15-4:30 p.m.
Kerrie Oakes, "The Impact of E-Democracy on the Role of the Civil Servant"
Alicia Schatteman, "Democracy and E-Participation: A Case Study of Ontario's Assembly on Electoral Reform"

Sponsors
Besides the Mershon Center, this conference is jointly sponsored by the Moritz College of Law, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and the Center for Technology and Government at SUNY Albany.

Peter Shane
Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law, Moritz College of Law

Stephen Coleman
Professor of Political Communication and
Director of Research, Institute for Communications Studies University of Leeds