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Thank you Stephen Coleman for sending this along ... See: http://www.yougov.com/news.jsp;jsessionid=4s4mk7uqm1?news.id=20016706 I welcome the invitation to contribute to this conference. As Chair of the Cabinet Committee on E-Democracy, it gives me an opportunity to share with you our thinking and to seek your help with our work. That work springs from the confluence of two separate modern developments. The first is the worrying decline in the participation rate in our democracy. It is a worry captured in the title of this conference Reviving Democracy. There would be no need to talk about reviving democracy if democracy was already in good heart and robust health. - clip - ... The strategic danger is that the public senses a loss of ownership of the democratic process. Reviving democracy means restoring a sense of ownership the public. I mentioned a confluence of two modern developments. The other development is the revolution in communication technology. It is a technology now so commonplace that the time may have come to drop the word new as its prefix. To most people under forty the e-mail and the text message are routine parts of their life style, and they are mildly amused when politicians of a certain age write with breathless excitement about technologies they have just discovered. We have long passed the moment at which the number of e-mails dispatched in Britain out-numbers the number of letters posted. There is a connection waiting to be made between the decline in democratic participation and the explosion in new ways of communicating. We need not accept the paradox that gives us more ways than ever to speak, and leaves the public with a wider feeling than ever before that their voices are not being heard. The new technologies can strengthen our democracy, by giving us greater opportunities than ever before for better transparency and a more responsive relationship between government and electors. The Cabinet Committee on e-democracy was set up to make the connections between government and public, which the new technologies offer. In this context I do not mean government in its limited sense of a ministerial collective. I use it to embrace all forms of public and accountable authority, including all the diverse range of agencies, regulators and quangos that make up modern government. ... See article URL above for full text. *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
