The project |
Norway is not the only country experiencing problems with local democracy. Other nations have observed an increasing distance between politicians and citizens as well as a general lack of interest in political issues (Arterton, 1987). Consequently, in the last decade, several projects and field studies have addressed the question of how to stimulate local democracy using telecommunication technology to improve communication between stakeholders -- politicians, administrators, and the local community. Pilot projects include computer conferencing systems, public information terminals, televoting systems, and electronic town meetings (Covi, 1994; Guthrie and Dutton, 1992; Becker, 1993; Varley, 1991). Teledemocracy, the rubric applied to these efforts, refers "not to a politics that would undercut our established representative machinery, but to the use of communications technology to facilitate the transmission of political information and opinion between citizens and their public leaders" (Arterton, 1987: p. 14). The focus of teledemocracy has been on using technology to increase citizens' involvement in the political process by supporting the flow of information within groups of citizens or between citizens and politicians, which is very much in line with Etzioni's early experiments with teledemocracy (Etzioni, 1992). However, as a result of his research, he concludes that electronic meetings do not work, and electing representatives to engage in the give-and-take of developing public policy is preferable. Thus, it seems appropriate to reconsider the direction of teledemocracy research. This project tackled two relatively neglected areas of local political communication -- the links between politicians and the connection between them and administrators. There are four roles in a democratic system -- citizen, law-maker (politician), law implementer (administrator), and law-adjudicator (Ponton and Gill, 1993: 145). The independence of the judicial system, a tenet of the democratic system, explains why it has been excluded from teledemocracy projects. Prior teledemocracy research, as discussed above, has concentrated on communication between politicians and citizens, with particular emphasis on supporting communication among citizens (see Figure 1). In this study, the goal was to support local government by improving communication among local politicians and facilitating their communication with the local administration. The study concentrated on improving politician's communication capabilities (see Figure 1), and is similar in intent to the first stage of a project for the European Parliament (Davies and Jegu, 1995 ). Thus, we extend the notion of teledemocracy to embrace the transmission of political information and opinion between and within all the groups involved in politics -- citizens, politicians, and administrators. In other words, teledemocracy is using information technology to enhance the democratic process (Davies and Jegu, 1995). |
Figure 1. Researching a neglected area of teledemocracy
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Research methodology |
The study used participatory action research (PAR) in which the community under study actively participates in the research (Whyte, 1990). Fittingly, PAR has its origins in Norwegian work democracy research (Thorsrud, 1977; Elden, 1979) and reflects a Scandinavian tradition of the importance of a cooperative learning by the researchers and the organization's representatives (Elden and Levin, 1990). PAR establishes a setting in which participants, the subjects and the researchers, exchange information and make informed choices, including the decision to participate (Argyris and Schön, 1990). It is a cyclic process of investigation that includes the identification and diagnosis of a problem, planning of actions, implementation, and evaluation of results. The goal is to produce solutions to the current problem and also to advance knowledge about the particular type of problem investigated (Elden and Chisolm, 1993). This study is novel in that there are two levels of PAR, and you browse the results of two pieces of action research -- the teledemocracy study and its electronic reporting. First, as applied scientists we worked with local politicians to gather data, and design and implement a solution to improve communication among politicians. Following the precepts of PAR, some of the participants were actively involved in the design, deployment, and implementation of the communication network. Furthermore, they participated in discussing the implications of the project and commented on this report. Second, we participated with the editor and members of the editorial board of MISQ Discovery to discover how to use the Web to present IS research. In submitting an article, we implicitly proposed a design for reporting research in this electronic journal, when no design had been formulated. Thus, reviewers had to deal with two issues -- the quality of the research and its presentation. The authors then had to respond to the reviewers' ideas for adding value to the content and to their critique of the presentation. We continued to cooperate, mainly with the editor, to develop a presentation design. In preparing this document and complying with some of the editorial board's requests, we quickly discovered that we had to learn about managing a set of HTML files and using features of HTML support applications (for more details see the engine room). |
The field site |
Salangen, a northern Norwegian rural municipality, was chosen as the project partner and site for the field trial. The idea for the project was first presented to the municipality's local council, which made a commitment to participate. A six member project board (henceforth called the project board) was established from members of the different political parties and the local administration. This board constituted the interface between Telenor Research and the participating politicians. In addition, the board represented the politicians' and administrators' interest in the project. The next step was to analyze political work in terms of content, communication patterns, workload patterns, and advantages and drawbacks as perceived by the politicians. This process mainly served two purposes. First, it provided a framework that helped in determining the functionality of the tool to be developed. Second, it served as a reference point for evaluating the use of any technologies applied to political work. This workflow analysis included the following activities:
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