ARIADNE: Rolf, can you describe what the DEMOS Project was about? If I remember well, it was awarded as one of the best run and most promising projects of the whole 5 th Framework Program.

ROLF: DEMOS aimed at exploiting the interactive potential of the Internet to involve citizens in the political process. Our vision was to discuss political issues with large numbers of participants while keeping the debate from loosing any sense of direction. We wanted to develop tools and methodologies enabling large scale online-discussions to come to concrete results which can be handed over to political decision makers. In a way, this is what we did. Regarding the award you mentioned – this is something we are still waiting for...

ARIADNE: What has happened since then? I know that your organisation has continued to develop and test this new environment in Germany and abroad.

ROLF: That’s right. The technical platform has been re-implemented and now includes all the features currently known under the catch phrase web 2.0 - like RSS, Wikis, tagging etc. However, the technical platform is just one aspect of the DEMOS approach. Our core competence is to close the difference between citizens and governments, voters and politicians, laymen and ex perts by acting as impartial mediators or facilitators. With DEMOS we can organise structured and constructive online-debates with thousand of participants. One of our latest projects was e.g. a consultation process about the Hamburg’s budget and financial policy. In the course of the four week lasting discussion almost 3000 citizens registered, approx. 50.000 visitors have been counted. Also ex perts, politicians and VIPs have participated actively. The media coverage of the e-participation project was remarkable: Almost all regional news pa per, radio & TV stations reported about the moderated online discourse (See http://www.hamburg-haushalt.de/).

ARIADNE: Drawing on this ex perience, what do you think may be the prospects of e-Democracy in Europe? And do you see any differences between the situation in the Old and New Member States?

ROLF: I have now doubts that the Internet will become more and more important for politics in Europe. Online petitions, for instance, have already become a powerful means for citizens to articulate political objections. One impressive example of this is the “one seat campaign” to stop the European Parliament commuting between Brussels and Strasbourg every month initiated by Cecilia Malmström, Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Liberal Party. Her online petition initiative collected more than 800.000 European citizen signatures.However, the real challenge in reconnecting with the European electorate is not only for citizens to have a means to articulate what they don’t want, but also to consider ways of actively involve citizens constructively in the formation of EU policies to build much more of a sense of a European community.Europe has much to gain if it can benefit from its highly distributed and diverse ex pertise (“wisdom of crowds”) and by harnessing its “collective intelligence”. Of course there are still huge differences between the Old and New Member States. While in the Old Member States public participation has a – more or less – strong tradition, residents of the New Member states might still be much more concerned with basic social and economic problems. Even where citizens find the resources to participate in the political process, a lack of transparency of decision making and openness of the public administration towards participative approaches may still be seen as serious hurdles to be overcome. Finally, in most of the new member states the internet penetration rates are still much lower.

ARIADNE: A final comment on the exploitation phase of publicly funded research projects, that is always a little bit “tricky” as we know. Which lessons do you think we can learn from the positive outcomes of the DEMOS project?

ROLF: I am not sure if the ex periences of the DEMOS project are to be generalized. In the DEMOS case we had a vision, partners who believed in the project and the chance to test our pilots under real world conditions. To have the cities of Bologna and Hamburg as pilot user on board was in our case the basis of the successful exploitation. Thank you Rolf!

Who is Ralf?

Rolf Luehrs heads the department of Interactive Communication of TuTech Innovation GmbH, a public private partnership based in Hamburg. He has been working for almost a decade in the fields of social science, technology assessment and online research and has been involved in many different national and European research and development projects. Rolf is specialised on the theory of democracy and public participation, being author of numerous articles in scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. From 2000 to 2003 he was the scientific and technical manager of the European project DEMOS (Delphi Mediation Online System) which is actually the starting point of our interview.

You can reach Rolf at luehrs@tutech.de

You can learn more about TuTech from www.tutech.de