The presentation “Politics 2.0” (Session 5) on 22nd of March 2012 was made up of three interesting lectures.
The first one – reported by Prof. Agnese Vardaney from the University of Teramo – dealt with the “Usage of social media in Italian local electoral campaigns”.
Prof. Vardaney talked about different electoral systems and rules in Italy based on major and small towns. The Internet is used everyday for various reasons and to involve electoral campaigns in this process a personalisation of communication is needed. Affiliating with this are personal characteristics of candidates, electoral systems and party size as well as internal organizations.
The analysis of strategies in campaigns with social interactivity includes three factors: Constituency, geographical area and party size.
The association between these factors and social interactivity like websites or facebook permits different conclusions:
– big cities have more web presence than smaller cities
– there is a digital divide between Centre- North and South
– an electoral system is needed
– votes have political relevance
– there are two patterns of web presence
The second lecture by Roumiana Tsankara from the Technical University Sofia dealt with web based face to face e-governance systems.
Characteristics of administrative management processes called e- governance make e- democracy wider through openness, transparence and visibility. This management is divided into different stages and levels like strategic management, tactical management and operational management.
With it online availability gets more and more important. Web based videoconferences give opportunities to interact online with transparency. The goal is more democracy.
Mrs. Tsankara pointed out that the value of the indicator “electronic services use” in EU is fewer than 30%. The main factors of the low result are electronic services unsatisfaction, limited internet access, complicated and expensive procedure for production of electronic signature and insufficient information about online services. Probably the citizens would like to be involved directly in the whole management.
To improve the effectiveness of applications of videoconference processes there are some criteria like daily expenditure saving, reducing travel costs, low technical expenses and more.
Mrs. Tsankaras plan for the future is to involve heterogeneous tools.
Her result is to use web based videoconference for electoral training process like video seminars, lectures and consultation.
At the end of her lecture she made the conclusions and recommendations that the good governance requires full transparency, predictability, accountability of the administrative management information at all levels and that the work of current solutions can be extended to include mobile heterogeneous network architecture.
The third lecture reported by Bazilah Hj A Talip from the University of Kualalumpur was about an exploration of the role of Web and mobile social media in the implementation of e- government in Malaysia. Rural
E-government provides some advantages. The rural and provincial areas can get better access to Government services and all citizens and business can access information about policies and more. But general problems indentified. Students would like to interact with their teachers via facebook but the teachers are not allowed to use it while working. Furthermore there is an inadequate and content support, reluctance of acceptance by citizens and a lack of government support.
Mrs. Hj A Talip has made a SWOT analysis for Malaysia with the criteria strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Her conclusions are that more research and environment scan of other successes and failures are needed and that the Malaysian Government must undertake research in e-government services to meet Malaysian citizen needs.
In summary the lectures were very interesting and recommendable.
