Bamblog

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Just returned from a short trip to the Rheinland - visiting my parents in Bonn on Wednesday and attending a workshop at the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung in Düsseldorf on Thursday: "Medienmix in der lokalen Demokratie" (Media-Mix in local democracy). The workshop was organized by the "Institut für Informationsmanagement Bremen" (IFIB) and served as sort of a "kick-off"-meeting for a two-year-project on local E-Democracy. Its main goal was to bring E-Democracy experts together and provide a space for feedback to the project team. Since Prof. Theis-Berglmair had to hold oral exams today, I had the pleasure of representing the Forschungsstelle "Neue Kommunikationsmedien" at the Workshop and meeting a couple of interesting people, including:
- Busso Grabow (Deutsches Institut f�r Urbanistik)
- Oliver Märker (Fraunhofer AIS - Knowledge & Communication)
- Peter Mambrey (Fraunhofer FIT)

After two initial presentations by Herbert Kubicek and Hilmar Westholm about the first project findings, we jumped into a lively discussion on various aspects of online-based local participation. We talked quite a while about activities in a discussion board (on the re-design of a public bath), where ca. 40 postings had been made within five weeks. The project team seemed to be a little bit disappointed about this (seemingly) low turn-out, but in fact did not actively encourage or stimulate discussions.
Now, the problem with internetbased participation - apart from access and competency barriers in general - is to get a critical mass not only of participants, but of postings as well; actually, the latter would be the prerequisite of the former, since visitors will not be likely to return to a site if the won’t expect new postings over time. So an interactive discussion board will only attract users (and turn some of them from lurkers into contributors), if there are regular contributions - either by other users or by the moderators/facilitators. So trying to be the "neutral host" might be the wrong strategy to engage citizens; one should rather encourage users by posting short to-the-point-statements provoking reactions.
What we didn’t talk about, but I will think about in the future, is how social software might be useful for promoting participatory (local) E-Democracy. Starting next year, the IFIB-Team will conduct a case study on "Bürger Online Redaktionen in Stadtteilen", which seems to be some kind of "neighbourhood journalism". Why not train the volunteers on using Weblogs as a low-barrier, personalized Content Management System? I’m sure instances of "localized weblogs" already exist - just have to find them..

The "von Schmidt"-estate

Some discussion topics