Next week I’m off to Austria to the Danube (Donau) University at Krems, where I am presenting a paper at EDem08 –the university’s first eDemocracy conference.
I’m presenting a paper about the WEB.DEP project www.web-dep.eu
The Western Balkans Democratic Participation (WEB.DEP) project is a specific support action, funded under the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme with a view to using the Internet to further progress towards the Commission’s aims, as outlined above. The project is a partnership of 7 organisations, including the national news-media agencies from Albania, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as well as organisations from 2 Member States (Greece and the United Kingdom). The project aims to establish an online initiative, consisting of national thematic portals to enable sharing of news and public information. These portals contain community forums, integrated with the news system and designed to support e-participation. The portals are hosted and managed by the news agencies – Albanian Telegraphic Agency (ATA), Macedonian Information Agency (MIA) and National News Agency of the Republic of Serbia (Tanjug). There is also a central forum, in English, to facilitate regional interaction. News agency employees and other local journalists will create the content for these portals and facilitate the forums according to a shared code of ethics (in practice a family of governance codes) developed and agreed by the partners. As the media play a fundamental role in democracy they are well placed at the centre of an e-participation initiative.
These portals are now live:
- ATA: www.ata.gov.al/web-dep
- MIA: www.web-dep.mia.com.mk/MIA
- Tanjug: web-dep.tanjug.rs/
- Central (English Language Forum): central.web-dep.eu
The paper is a methodology paper about how we used scenarios (structured fictional accounts of people using the forums) to involve all partners in the design of the e-participation sections. eParticipation and eDemocracy projects involve people from diverse backgrounds with different experiences and objectives. We used scenarios as a way to bridge gaps between the news agency partners, who moderate and manage the portals and the technical partners, who created the specification and the tools. Scenarios are a cheap and lightweight way to start to design a system and help to ensure that objectives and understanding are shared and that problems or disagreements are identified before prototypes are built. This is useful, as once a prototype is built, people begin to be reluctant to change the way it works.
If you’re interested in scenarios:
- Carroll, JM. (2000) Making Use: scenario-based design of human-computer interactions; MIT Press Cambridge, MA, USA
- JISC (2005); Scenarios from the Managed Learning Environments for Lifelong Learning Support Project
- Lewis, C. and Rieman, J. (1994); ‘Task-centered user interface design: A Practical Introduction’ Chapter 2
