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ISSN number: 1746-4757

  

Renewing Democracy with 'E-Community Councils'

Ann Macintosh and Andy McKay-Hubbard

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The project has two phases each lasting one year and each with its own aims and deliverables. In this first phase a model and corresponding on-line tools are being developed for a target community council that is currently familiar with, and using IT to conduct some aspects of their work. This is the Strathfillan Community Council based in Crianlarich. The results from the 2001/2002 Scottish Household Survey [10] indicate that on average 43% of households in this area have access to the internet, this can be compared to an average of 35% for the whole of Scotland in that same reporting period.

The community is basically a rural one. There are 10 councilors all proficient in IT and they all have access to a PC and internet connection from their homes. By focusing on this IT literate group the impact of some of the known variables - in particular access to and familiarity with technology - is minimised. At the end of year one, and after piloting and evaluation, the initial model and tools will then be generalised and tested again with five other Community Councils with varying degrees of literacy and covering both urban and rural communities. The results of this second phase will allow an overall roll out mechanism for Community Councils and other community groups in a region to be developed.

All the participating Community Councils are being actively engaged in deciding the ‘look & feel’ and functionality of the on-line democracy tools in order to ensure a feeling of ownership in their future use and development. The pilot tools are:

1. E-consulting. An internet based tool to support Community Councils to gather the opinions about issues from communities. This will allow users to express views on what they want preserved or changed, and so provide a basis for Community Councils to identify collective local policy issues.

2. E-information. An internet based tool for content management which will provide efficient ways of summarising and disseminating appropriate information to community groups throughout Scotland by allowing the groups to contribute news items of interest and to exchange views with other groups.

3. E-voting. An internet based tool to support participative (non-legally binding) voting and lobbying. This will support decentralised voting and counting and will inform voters on the purpose of the voting, the issues under consideration, the voting process, arrangements for the counting of the votes and the subsequent results.

The Community Council web site and associated e-democracy tools are being designed in a modular fashion to allow new e-democracy tools to be added if and when appropriate.

4. Conclusions

The overarching objective of our work is to investigate renewing local democracy by enabling people and communities throughout Scotland to have greater influence over factors affecting their lives. We address this objective by investigating how ICTs can support community councils. This involves assessing the democratic requirements of community councils and other community groups using ICT in local settings, developing appropriate ICT based democratic community systems and subsequently evaluating their effectiveness and impact. The challenge is to examine ways in which ICT can contribute to democratic participation in local geographic communities.

The results of our work will be an assessment of ‘local’ democratic needs, the e-democracy tools to meet these needs, and recommendations to suggest how best practice e-democracy systems should be rolled out in local communities across Scotland. The work will provide a framework to better appreciate the significance of technology in supporting democracy at local community level, and in so doing enable wider and deeper participation in community planning. In seeking to consult communities, listen to their democratic needs, and consider their perceptions, the work will help to include communities themselves in establishing policy to improve the quality of citizenship across Scotland. Importantly, the work will provide a better appreciation of the significance of technology in supporting e-democracy at local community level, and in so doing contribute to the modernising government agenda of the Scottish Executive.

Acknowledgements

This project is being conducted in partnership with the Association of Community Councils for the Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park area, Stirling Assembly, the Association of Scottish Community Councils, Stirling Council and with the support of Dr Sylvia Jackson MSP. We acknowledge the support of our partners in writing this paper. Thanks are also due to the Scottish Executive for their support in funding this work.

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Footnotes

10. www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/finance/spv7-28.asp#610 return