Agneta Ranerup
Department of Informatics
Göteborg university
agneta@informatik.gu.se

This short paper describes a case of when Participatory Design (PD) and usage of modern information technology (IT) such as the Internet goes on beyond the workplace. The case is situated in a local government context in Sweden. The system that is implemented has as its aim to improve the contacts between local government and citizens by using the Internet, and preferably also to improve local government democracy by providing on-line discussion forums. Consequently, the potential participators in the design process include civil servants and citizen groups, as well as politicians. In the following, there will be reflections on factors that have influenced the democratic effects of the forums, with a specific focus on the PD activities. The aim is to provide a picture of what factors affect the democratic potential of on-line discussion forums as defined by those that are involved at a local level. Hopefully, this will be of interest also to the community of researchers.

Three different local government districts in Göteborg that take part in the DALI project by using the DALI-system are included in the study. Long (30-90 minutes) interviews have been conducted with 17 persons; leading local politicians, webmasters and infomasters, leading civil servants at the local level, as well as a centrally situated technician, and a director of IT at the City of Göteborg. Additional shorter interviews have been made by phone and email with nine members of the user groups that took part in the development of the DALI-system, and with six additional local politicians. This part of the empirical study was conducted between May 1997 and February 1998. The content of the interviews have been the guidance to what should be considered as important results, rather than an extensive theoretical framework. This means that the research approach has a strong inductive character.

The DALI-system in Göteborg is a part of a project at the European level, within the I*M Europe-Telematics Application Program. The project has been partially financed by the European Commission. The systems development work took place during the second half of 1996, and the DALI-system was opened to the citizens during the first months of 1997. Since that point of time, the system has been accessed by citizens either from computers in private homes, or from nine public terminals. Furthermore, computers have been distributed to four of the leading local politicians in each one of the three districts that took part in the project. One condition that had to be fulfilled before getting economic support from the European Commission was that user groups should be engaged in the systems development process. In Göteborg, various user groups have been involved in this process from the autumn of 1996 - spring 1997. In district A and B the participants were recruited from the local political parties that are represented in the district council, whereas in district C the participants were recruited from other local organisations. As e.g., user representatives were recruited from the boards of private schools, childcare institutions, and organisations of pensioners. There have been several meetings between the systems developers of the DALI project, and the user representatives. At the meetings, short introductions to computers and the Internet were given due to the differences in knowledge about computers and the Internet. Almost all participators had some experiences of computers, but much less experiences of Internet.

After a few months, the user representatives could experience and react to the appearance of the DALI-system (late 1996). The users also discussed how appropriate manuals to the public kiosks should be designed, as well as where the public terminals should be placed. Views of a more critical character were also put forward, as e.g. how information about the DALI could be made known to the citizens, which was seen as important.

When asked if their own organisation were using the Internet and the DALI-system, only two of the nine user representatives knew that this was the case. However, one of these users was included in the DALI project as a politician. According to these experiences, at the time of the interviews (late 1997), the usage of Internet had to a rather limited degree spread to others than the politicians that have been involved in the DALI project.

The present version of the DALI-system comprises four main areas that are accessed through the district home page. The administrative information section contains information about the opening hours, addresses, and activities of various municipal services, such as childcare, schools, social services, libraries, and sports facilities etc. The current issues section contains the political proposals of the district council, revised protocols of its decisions, and local news of a general character. The discussion forum consists of moderated, publicly accessible debates on current political issues in which both citizens and politicians can participate. In the DALI-system, there are also lists of some of the local politicians and their electronic mail addresses allowing for direct contact between citizens and politicians. Lastly, the archives contain outdated discussions and documents with a free-text search capability. The home page of district A had 28 visits/day during February-Mars 1998, the one of district B 49 visits/day, and the one of district C 47 visits/day.

The participation in the discussion must to be characterised as rather modest, with the exception of one of the districts (C). During a period of one year (January 1997-January 1998), there has been 36 contributions to the debate in district A, 50 in district B, and 145 in district C. A majority of the contributions have been made by anonymous citizens. The largest group of citizens that have been active are those engaged in traffic issues (planning of roads etc.), as well as those engaged in the relation between their own local district and the City of Göteborg. Another prominent group consists of those who are interested in issues related to schools and childcare. Furthermore, the modest participation in the discussion by citizens in general, and by politicians in particular, has been discussed in two of the three districts.

In the DALI case there was an ambition to include user groups in the development process, but the PD activities stopped approximately at the same time as when the DALI-system was opened to the citizens (early spring 1997). Unfortunately it seems that the PD activities ought to have continued during a much longer period of time, because the stipulated activities were not enough to result in a lively debate in the three districts. Previous experiences indicate that different kinds of uncertainty affect the result of community based systems development. With his examples from the African health sector, Braa [1] describes that uncertainty can apply both as to the context of the development process, as well as to the goals of the development process. In the DALI case both kinds of uncertainty seem to have been represented. DALI was developed as a local government initiative, in which other non-governmental organisations were included in the PD activities. Community networks and other local government networks are, as a contrast, often initiated by the non-governmental organisations themselves. This makes it more likely that the organisations have at least a minimum of interest in using the network. In other words, there was uncertainty or limited knowledge of the context of the DALI-system because the potential user groups were either not reflected upon, or taken for granted.

However, local government networks with on-line discussion forums that have been introduced by voluntary organisations does not guarantee a lively political discussion per se. This is exemplified by the networks of Berlin [10] and Amsterdam [4]. In Berlin the historical experiences of the Weimar Republic created a mistrust towards political turbulence and populist strategies, according to Schmidtke [10]. As a consequence, the political culture did not support that citizens should be involved in interactive political discussion. In Amsterdam, there were some political discussions in on-line forums, albeit much more limited in size than the debate about other issues [4].

Furthermore, the goal to improve democracy was not clearly defined in the DALI project, and can by itself be characterised as too vague. This is an example of what Braa calls goal uncertainty. Most probably, if the goal of improved democracy had been broken down and made clearer, it would have been easier to define measures that have to be taken for the goal to be attained. One of these could be to let the user representatives participate also after the DALI-system has been introduced to the citizens. This would be a kind of continuous user participation after the implementation of the first version of a system [8].

In all kinds of previous research about the democratic effects of IT in general, and of Internet in particular, access to technology and knowledge is defined as the most important factor that affects their democratic potential [12, 15]. Limited access to technology and knowledge has also been defined as a factor that was harmful to the democratic potential of IT in the DALI project as well, which is something that should be noticed by systems developers. As a contrast, in one of the districts (district C), the access was seen as less of a problem due to (as was described) a higher access to technology and knowledge. These experiences, as well as the exponential growth of Internet access itself in Sweden [16], could be seen as evidence to support that the problem with access is slowly diminishing. Also, the Swedish unions are involved in projects with the aim to spread Internet access among their members [7]. Hopefully, this means that the democratic effects of Internet in Sweden are not so far away. Limited knowledge of the very existence of the DALI-system was defined as another problem by the interviewed. Accordingly, a systems developer should notice the importance of spreading knowledge about IT in general, as well as knowledge about the home page of the local government in particular. If this isn’t done, a high access to the technology per se is of no value if the aim is to improve democracy by providing a discussion forum. This has not been pointed out as clearly in previous research.

High access to technology is often seen as decisive to the success of Internet when used to improve democracy. As a contrast, the debate itself in the DALI case as well as the experiences of the interviewed, implied that an equal difficult thing could be to make the politicians participate in the debate in the forum. This problem is not treated very often in previous research, with the exception of as e.g. Docter and Dutton [3]. In other words, some politicians in the DALI case found it difficult to accept the technology as a tool to be used in the political debate. The problem of acceptance when implementing on-line discussion forums is similar to the situation where groupware is introduced [6]. Using groupware, as well as on-line forums, is not obligatory in the same way as e.g. organisational information systems of a traditional character. Yet, the success of groupware as well as of discussion forums depends on if a critical mass of users can be attracted. To reach this goal, it is important to work actively with creating an understanding of the rational behind the technology, but also to provide education that demonstrates the positive impact of the technology [6]. Docter and Dutton [3] describe another reason why politicians didn’t want to participate. The politicians felt that the discussion in the forums often lacked substance, and that the debate contained personal attacks and ‘abusive’ behaviour. There were no such similar experiences in Göteborg.

On the other hand, the hesitance of some of the politicians in the DALI case towards participating in the debate is often not much of a problem, since many of them expressed positive attitudes towards participating (district B, C). Furthermore, the hesitance that did exist could, according to our experiences, be seen more as a result from that a few politicians had a negative attitude towards contributing to on-line forums, than because they were unwilling to discuss with citizens in any kind of forum [10]. As was shown by district A, even the politicians that did not want to discuss on-line, had a positive attitudes towards providing other kinds of discussion forums in the districts as e.g. open meetings. They were also willing to give personal answers to citizens by telephone or email. This can be seen as a good point of departure for changing the attitudes of the politicians.

Factors such as variations in access to technology and knowledge are rather familiar to professional systems developers when working with any kind of IT. Somewhat new and different are factors emanating from the logic of the political arena in local government. The political cycle and the mandate of the district council have in various ways, according to the interviewed, affected the amount of debate in the DALI case in Göteborg. Some of the interviewees described how the, as they perceived, limited mandate of the district council meant that there was not much to discuss and decide about at this level. Consequently, the participation in the debate was low. These are examples of how different political culture and context affect the projects as such, as well as the democratic results of using the technology. Defining the political cycle and the mandate of the district council as a part of the political culture that affects the debate is something new. Previous research has mostly treated general phenomena as if the political climate in the country as a whole supports citizen participation or not [15]. The study of the DALI in Göteborg is unique in that it is largely built on interviews with local politicians and others with experiences from the politics of local government.

It is difficult for a systems developer to affect aspects such as the mandate of the district council and the political cycle, except to keep them in mind as factors that influence the usage of any on-line discussion forum in a local government context. However, if a systems developer should be allowed to go further than implementing a discussion forum that is similar to the DALI-system the debate could be stimulated. It is possible to introduce functions that aim to engage different groups in using the Internet and the Web in a creative way in local government politics [11]. In this way, the political cycle could be affected as well. As e.g., groups of people that are interested in social issues could use the Internet to communicate with each other and their local politicians, and get local government support for doing this.

Furthermore, citizens could use the Internet and the Web to provide each other with documents such as protocols, petitions etc. Some of this information can be made accessible to local government politicians, who in their role as politicians deal with social issues. If such an arrangement is made, groups of people, as e.g., parents of children, or relatives of elderly and handicapped, are activated in the political discussion. This arrangement would also be a means to go beyond the idea of the Internet as just another media or link between local government and its citizens [9]. Instead, it would be a way of using the special character of the media (its interactive capacity, its capacity to connect people without the limits of time and space etc.). Critics like Castells could describe this as a way of liquidating urban political movements as sources of alternative political change, by integrating them in the structure and practice of local government [2]. At the same time, arranging a ‘activist-local government network’ can be seen as a way of giving access to power at the local level to various groups of citizens, and balancing the interests of more elitist groups.

The interest in traditional forms of political activities that are performed within the political parties is said to be low in Sweden. But, as a contrast, there is a considerable involvement at the local level in social issues such as schools, and childcare. The vision of an ‘activist-local government network’ in this section is partly in accordance with the kind of ‘advocacy networks’ that have been described by Friedland [5] and Schwartz [11], only that it includes some kind of local government sponsorship. A somewhat similar idea is outlined by Stegberg and Svensson [13]. They describe visions of when parents and relatives of children with a handicap are members of a network in which they can share information and views. The difference between their approach and the one in this article is that the system of Stegberg & Svensson has a much less defined role in local government politics. A network of, as e.g., parents of children, and relatives of elderly is grounded in a group interest, instead of a personal or geographical interest. The DALI-system in itself seems to be built on the belief that the mutual interest among citizens because of a common place of residence is enough to create a lively political discussion. Implementing technology to support group interest would not be in accordance with traditional deliberative ideals, as it could be characterised as a way to surpass representative democracy in its strictest sense. However, it is a manner in which systems developers can change the political cycle into one that includes a genuine discussion between politicians and citizens.