Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2005
Minitrack: ‘Electronic Democracy’ (Cluster e-Government)
Ann Macintosh International Teledemocracy Centre Napier University 10 Colinton Road Edinburgh, EH10 5DT, UK
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Eric Welch Department of Public Administration University of Illinois at Chicago 412 South Peoria Street Chicago, IL 60607
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Increasingly, governments are seeking to broaden participation in decision making by providing effective techniques to deliver more open and transparent democratic decision-making processes. This mini-track focuses on the use of information and communication technologies to engage citizens and support the democratic decision-making processes. These processes can be divided into two main categories, one addressing the whole of the electoral process, which includes e-voting, and the other addressing citizen eparticipation in decision-making. This minitrack presents 7 research papers that investigate this challenging research area, demonstrating how a combination of technical, social and political measures are required and recognizing the complex processes that are involved. The minitrack session starts with a paper entitled Institutionalization of a general electronic democracy through electronic democratic parties – a general concept with focus on Germany. The paper, coauthored by Norbert Gronau, Edzard Weber and Mathias Uslar, deals with the structural and organizational requirements for a party to support electronic voting for decision-making. In the second paper, Social Software and Cyber Networks: Ties that Bond or Weak Associations within the Political Organization?, authors David Green and John Pearson consider how the 2004 US Presidential election has used online media to reach potential voters. As such the paper focuses on technologies such as blogs and instant messaging and to what effect these have been used in political campaigns. The third paper stays with US voting as its theme but this time considers whether there is a need to turn to electronic voting given the fiasco of the Florida
Michael Gisler Swiss Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication Monbijoustrasse 74 CH-3003 Bern, Switzerland
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2000 election. A Better Way to Vote by Charles Gaston looks at what security means for voting. Moving from the US to the UK, the fourth paper is Procedural Security and Social Acceptance in e-Voting and is co-authored by Alexandros Xenakis and Ann Macintosh. This paper moves away from the traditional search for security through technology and instead focuses on the processes and procedures that can support a secure e-election and facilitate social acceptance. Enterprise Architecture Integration in eGovernment by Marijn Janssen and Anthony Cresswell is the fifth paper to be presented. The paper argues the need for government to move away from stand alone applications and it presents a simulation-based approach to designing and evaluating ways to achieve more comprehensive, integrated architectures. The sixth paper Interorganisational Information Integration in the Criminal Justice Enterprise: Preliminary Lessons from State and County Initiatives by Ramon Gil-Garcia, Carrie Schneider, Therasa Pardo and Anthony Cresswell, continues on the integration theme. It identifies useful information integration strategies and examines in more detail the factors that influenced the success of selected criminal justice integration initiatives. Finally, the seventh paper is The Role of the Election Commission in Electronic Voting. In it, Robert Krimmer investigates the control possibilities of an election commission in e-voting and presents a technical solution.
0-7695-2268-8/05/$20.00 (C) 2005 IEEE
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