10th EPRI conference - Background information

Theme:

Purpose of the Conference

In these times of global networking, increasing digitisation and web-based ICT penetration, parliaments and parliamentarians must seize every opportunity to develop and produce formats and content for today’s information and communication needs.
This is more about providing a wide-range of services than simple politician – citizen communication. The point is to organise the political workflow on the basis of optimal technology use thus closing the political gap between the government / parliament and the people.  Apart from failures caused by technical and administrative factors, other elements play an important role in the quantity and quality of eGovernment offerings, such as general acceptance and customer needs as well as the integration and linking of all these services.
It is generally accepted that a strong presence of web-based eGovernment services and a lively interaction with citizens is essential for encouraging and maintaining citizens’ participation in parliamentary decision making.
Examples of  these electronic information and communication offerings are:
virtual tax offices, eDocuments, interactive city councils, citizen portals, mobile eGovernment, MP-Blogging and different types of eVoting.

Questions to be discussed

There is a broad range of tools and services available on the web. But why does the rate of engagement with these offerings differ by country throughout the EU? What are the reasons for a higher ICT penetration and eGovernment usage e.g. in Scandinavian countries than in the UK? What are the experiences of parliamentarians and what can they do to secure greater citizen participation through ICT?

The 10th EPRI conference will concentrate on asking parliamentarians whether and how they register and measure the response to their electronic information and communication offerings on the web. Speakers will be invited to give qualitative and quantitative statements on whether and how their offers have generated relevant responses in the sense of “eParticipation”.
The conference will target parliamentarians with a distinctive media policy in the development of electronic interaction with the public. The intention is to find representatives of media policy options such as:

• The “multimedia focus”: maximum exploitation of the multimedia features offered by present Web technologies
• The “channel focus”: an electronic communication that adapts broadcasting techniques to reach the intended audience
• The “content focus”: optimising the user’s access to information by developing search, browsing, navigation, visualisation and retrieval features;
• The “lifestyle focus”: placing information and communication offers at web locations, where relevant web-based communities exist;
• The “target group focus”: structuring one and the same content in different formats, containers or channels, in order to better reach heterogeneous target groups.

Target of the Conference

The conference will try to assess the experiences of parliaments and their members and analyse whether there is a “Digital Dividend” arising from political activities through various web-based formats. The conference will do this by presenting good (and bad) experiences that MPs have had with some of their more ambitious web projects, with experiences from other projects that measure the effect on citizen interactions or e.g. the benefit of eCampaigning across various platforms like “MySpace” or “Second Life”. The objective is to give attendees a clearer profile of what impact, reaction and sustainability they can expect when using today’s web formats to bring their messages to their constituency and trigger discussions and citizen participation.