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Lessons learnt from CitizenScape Pilot Trials
Here we describe some of the learning from the project and group these together into strategic, policy and process issues which we believe will be of interest to anyone who is trying to use new technologies in order to support democratic engagement. This might include Elected Representatives, Government Officers and Community Co-Ordinators. We also believe that the strategic issues highlighted are of interest to the practitioners and best practice leaders in the field of eDemocracy.
CitizenScape Lessons LearntCitizenScape has been developed to address the problem of democratic deficit, by utilising the phenomenal popularity of online social networking. Co-creative online spaces such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are successfully welcoming citizens to engage and build communities – places where everyone can have their say, sharing knowledge, ideas and opinions. Engagement with democratic decision-making processes has meanwhile significantly decreased, and these state-of-the-art web-based tools have been neglected in their potential to bridge that gap. The underlying assumption of CitizenScape is that people are already using the internet in a civic way – the question is whether it is possible to connect this to formal democracy.
