Perspectives Workshop: Democracy in a Network Society

Press Room

• Elektronische Demokratie - Wie das Internet die Politik beeinflusst
  Von Thomas Reintjes, Interviews mit Seminarteilnehmern, Deutschlandfunk, 3.10.2009
• Bundestag ohne Papier? - Grenzen für den Technikeinsatz in Parlament und Verwaltung
  Wissenschaftsjournalist Thomas Reintjes im Gespräch mit Manfred Kloiber, Deutschlandfunk, 3.10.2009
• Elektronische Demokratie - Wie das Internet die Politik beeinflusst
  Podcast der Beiträge im Deutschlandfunk am 3.10.2009; von Thomas Reintjes
• Die Grenzen der elektronischen Demokratie
  Press Release 15.09.2009 (German only)

Motivation

This workshop will bring computer and social scientists together with legal scholars, practitioners, policy experts, and pollsters to chart and help plan the developing frontiers of new technologies for democratic processes in a networked society. It will gather a unique, multi-disciplinary collection of experts for a dialogue that promises to break new ground in exploring ways in which digital technologies can promote the vitality of online enhancements to democratic political systems of the 21st Century. To accomplish this, the workshop will provide new approaches to growing threats to such systems, such as malware, privacy invasion, false participants, and malfeasance, while providing the kind of transparency now possible and needed to engender public trust.

We are inviting experts with new conceptions for democratic processes aligned with the growing expectations of citizens, new ways to promote citizen interaction with elected representatives, new ways to inform and survey public opinion, new structures for transparency of government, new types of online decision making, and even new forms of more direct electronic democracy. These application ideas can be expected to stimulate new technical approaches to e-democracy and governance. We are also inviting computer scientists working on the frontiers of security and associated threats, who will be able to provide new types of mechanisms in search of useful applications such as so-called “private information retrieval,” “credential mechanisms,” “multiparty computations,” various forms of “electronic auctions,” and “untraceable” communications and payments systems. The selection of participants and the format of the meeting will be designed to bridge multi-disciplinary divides, which is essential to meaningful collaboration among these different sets of experts and create the opportunity for them to develop together fundamentally new and important structures with powerful practical utility.

In his seminal book “Technics and Civilization” Lewis Mumford chronicled the role of technology in structuring past civilizations to help engender new conceptions of the relationships between technology and society. One need not be a technological determinist to see that the technologies of the network society are poised to enable major innovation and change in the ways citizens can participate in the political process. Innovations resulting from the workshop are thus timely and well-positioned to stimulate new forms of democratic interaction and structures. The time has come to bring together the range of expertise needed to constructively address these opportunities and challenges.

The aims of the workshop also include creating a base level of mutual understanding, joint exploration of concrete solutions to existing problems, generation of new application concepts, and instigating collaboration between the fields.