Beyond Bureaucracy

While the Internet is often touted as a revolutionary technology, it might be noted that democratic institutions have witnessed no digital revolution through the Internet. This observation leads this chapter to argue that the field of e-democracy has generally failed to live up to its own reformist rhetoric. It argues that instead of reforming government processes through technology, e-democracy projects have tended to focus either on lowering the costs and increasing the efficiency of existing political processes or on analysing the civic participation that occurs outside of purpose-built e-democracy platforms. The chapter suggests that this lack of attention to the Internet’s potential for systemic change in formal political institutions has little normative impact on the democratization of society and may even re-enforce, rather than challenge, the sociopolitical status quo. Further, it suggests that the current approach of e-democracy risks normalizing the Internet to the norms and expectations of the offline world. To elucidate this argument, this chapter overviews both the general trend of e-democracy projects and criticisms of those projects. Finally, the chapter proposes a more radical vision of e-democracy that, it suggests, would usher a larger potential for democratization. This more radical vision of e-democracy consists of recognizing the attributes of the Internet that transcend the limits of the analogue world and applying these to democracy. Such an approach would open the path for envisaging new political processes and systems, allowing the field of e-democracy to live up to its own rhetoric, and affording society the means to address multiple of the centuries-old problems faced by democracy.

This chapter describes Beyond Bureaucracy as an emerging research field concerned with radical innovation for governance of juropolitical systems. The grand objective of Beyond Bureaucracy is to act as an incubator for the development of new forms of organisation and new technological artefacts, which would enable transformation of public governance. In this role, Beyond Bureaucracy does not prescribe a concrete outcome, but rather calls for creative ideas, radical visions, and rigorous discussions on how twenty-century technology can serve as a basis for further transformation and radical development. This chapter explains how Beyond Bureaucracy differs from related fields like e-Government or e-Democracy, provides an overview over the state of research in Beyond Bureaucracy, provides links to follow-up literature, and aims to provide a seed vision on the transformation potentials that could be researched-towards in scope of Beyond Bureaucracy.

Almost from the moment the term was first coined, bureaucracy has been the subject of strong criticism and, if anything, such criticism has become more trenchant in recent decades. Numerous scholars, practitioners and politicians have talked about or envisaged systems of government/public administration which move beyond bureaucracy. These range from the tried to the theoretical. Others have forecast the end of bureaucracy—increasingly invoking information technology as a tool which can be used to achieve this end. In this chapter, a counter argument will be presented, i.e. that when it comes to protecting and vindicating public values in a complex modern state, bureaucracy can play a vital, and hard to displace, role.

Despite strong demands for specialisation, it is more and more obvious that modern research interests cannot be addressed in isolation—one could argue that even in research, the world is facing a kind of globalisation. The same is valid also for the understanding of the state, which is often reduced to certain components close to the individual researchers’ interests. In this chapter, we shall try to understand the modern state from the perspectives of different approaches and shall try to establish a more complex view on the modern state, which is trying to perform its duties, but fails in doing so due to a lack of ability to synchronise different fields, or due to its inability to step out of the elitist approach to the role of government. In this manner, this chapter tries to provide multiple and interconnected arguments for reform of the state on the level of political and societal reality while understanding the technological development as a framework and not the primary factor of the social change. The final argument is that the information and communication technologies are providing the possibilities for the changes, but changes themselves happen predominantly in the direction and extent allowed by the elites.

Having originated in Brazil, participatory budgeting (PB), notably the model created in Porto Alegre in 1989, has served as a reference for democratic innovation in Brazil and abroad, instigating diverse evaluations of its potential and limitations for promoting social, cultural and political-institutional change. This chapter maps the debates on the theme to identify the definitions of PB used in the literature and the analytical references that have been used not only to understand the rise, maintenance and success of PB programs, but also to assess their benefits to democracy, identifying variables and mechanisms which have a greater or lesser capacity to bring about democratic progress, such as the dimension of associativism, or of civil society, and the political will and or commitment of governments, as well as their institutional designs. Aiming at making a contribution to the field of studies on processes of democratic strengthening, the central issue consists in, based on studies on PB programs, discussing to what extent the process of diffusion and pluralization of participatory budgeting has not only affected its definition, but also challenged approaches centered on those variables and mechanisms.

The paper aims at changing the perception of virtual currencies, presenting them as the potential starting point for the fundamental changes in the functioning of the financial system. Its initial part deals with the problem of lack of universal definition of virtual currencies, pointing out crucial features to be included while conceptualizing the term. Subsequently, the paper describes the operation rules of decentralized virtual currency schemes, indicating that the schemes’ introduction is the reflection of current environmental trends. It also determines virtual currencies’ capacity to substitute cash, scriptural money or e-money. The paper emphasizes that the technology underlying virtual currencies offers benefits going far beyond the schemes themselves and has the potential to transform the financial market. The distributed ledger technology starts to penetrate various segments of the market, modifying the functioning of institutions forming its infrastructure. The technology makes it possible to eliminate intermediate links in processing transactions, accelerate various operations and reduce costs as well as provides the ground for the development of common standardized way of transferring various types of assets. Financial institutions pave the wave for transferring the technology into new fields. The public administration might take the emerging opportunity as there are a variety of possible applications of the distributed ledger technology in the sector. Since taking the full advantage of all the opportunities requires a significant regulatory progress, the final section of the paper addresses the problem of developing appropriate legal framework not stifling innovation on the market.

In 2012, the ‘European Multi-Stakeholder Platform on ICT Standardization’ (MSP) was inaugurated as a new platform for dialogue on European ICT standardization. The MSP was comprised of a wide range of members, e.g., representatives of national authorities of EU member-states and European Free Trade Association countries; the European and international ICT standardization bodies and stakeholder organizations representing industry; small- and medium-sized enterprises, consumers, and other stakeholders. The MSP was set up by the European Commission as a new kind of collaborative forum in ICT standardization, partly in response to the otherwise consolidated and formalized European standardization system, which had a clear allocation of competences between exclusively selected public and private actors, yet also inefficiencies due to a rather bureaucratic governance system. This chapter outlines the creation of the MSP as a new ICT-enabled collaborative decision-making system in European ICT standardization. Not due to the application of new technologies, but due to the systemic consequences of the fast development of ICT for political, administrative and regulatory setups of collaboration in Europe. This chapter provides an analysis of the MSP as a new type of forum for deliberation and cooperation in European ICT standardization, and it outlines how the platform facilitates a regulatory dialogue on ICT standardization in Europe. Simultaneously, the MSP plays a significant role in public–private co-creation of regulation and ICT standardization, and it may prove to be a pathbreaker leading to a ‘paradigm shift’ in the governance of European standardization. Finally, certain implications of the MSP are discussed.

One of the emerging innovations in the public sector is social innovation. National governments, international organisations and the civil society around the world are experimenting with new models for producing and monitoring public services not only to bring down the costs and increase efficiency, but also to improve transparency. At the core of social innovation is civic engagement and novel types of interactions between government and citizens. This chapter examines if and when social innovation improves transparency and civic participation. The author has carried out four case studies of crowdsourcing in health and education sectors in Asia and Europe, which are analysed by using Elinor Ostrom’s theory on co-production. The findings suggest that social innovation can, under certain conditions, open up government and facilitate the monitoring of service delivery. Conditions that favour these processes are not only complementarity of government and the civil society actions, established and formalised commitments, and financial and practical incentives to work in synergy, as suggested by Ostrom, but also strong organisational tactics, extensive community networks and skilled volunteers at the local level working for the civil society organisations behind social innovations.

Public managers face new challenges to their decision making that extend beyond their current knowledge and prior experiences. To answer these challenges, they need help from actors outside government, including expert citizens. Gamification and innovation labs are emergent strategies to address these knowledge gaps in public administrations, which offer interesting opportunities to engage citizens, but also present important challenges. Using the Technology Enactment Framework and recent theoretical developments on gamification, open data intermediaries, and living labs, this paper analyzes the role of gamification and innovation labs in the public sector. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with public managers, government officials, and other stakeholders involved in an innovation project in Mexico City, called “Mapaton,” which uses gamification techniques to engage citizens in mapping transportation routes. We identify some of the characteristics of gamification as an open innovation strategy in government and explain how gamification and innovation labs help government go beyond traditional bureaucratic structures and rules.

This chapter reports how participatory processes and ICT tools can go against rule-driven bureaucratic approaches to political participation and public deliberation, trying to defy strict procedural norms in favor of more flexible formats for citizen mobilization, political co-thinking, and sustained social innovation in the area of constitutional building. After describing key theoretical issues on trends and perspectives of public participation in constitution building processes, we review arguments in favor of ICT and social media use in constitutional building and then discuss an ongoing Greek bottom-up experiment named Syntagma 2.0 that introduced an innovative co-creative process for the production of a new Constitution for Greece, to be delivered by the citizens for the citizens. Based on the results of the aforementioned project so far, we present success factors for such initiatives.

This chapter discusses the emerging concept of Citizen Observatories (COs), explores the opportunities it represents for public authorities to go beyond incremental bureaucratic innovation and presents the first generation of European-funded experiences, held between 2012 and 2016. The concept of CO implies, according to the existing definitions, an open and shared information system dedicated to the collection of data on the environment and natural resources, using ICT, and the volunteer participation of individuals in data collection. The EU has adopted a more specific concept of CO in the projects funded, so that the resulting information complements existing earth observation systems (including the European Copernicus satellite programme). In the 2012–2016 period five CO projects have been funded by the EU, covering different areas: natural waters monitoring, odour monitoring, air quality monitoring, flood risk management and a platform for citizen science surveys. These COs allowed to develop and test the concept’s implementation, although the societal impact is still very limited, involving a reduced number of users. These projects have, however, established a very valuable set of resources, knowledge and expertise. This is an emerging field with interesting perspectives and possibilities. Although there is an economic rationale behind it (lowering the cost of in situ observation networks), it encloses the possibility of using ICT in the creation of a relation between public authorities and citizens that can produce a valuable return for citizens.

E-petitioning is a ubiquitous form of online political action that has emerged as a contemporary and potentially effective way for citizens to communicate with their governments about policy issues and that makes public participation in policy discussions more easily accessible. We argue that e-petitioning platforms generate novel types of data and that governments can benefit from the information acquired through various types of analyses. We begin by presenting e-petitioning as a new form of political participation in the context of several different types of national democracies. We suggest that e-petitioning has provided political activists with a new mechanism for collective action. From there we consider four popular national e-petitioning platforms in the countries of Scotland, Great Britain, Germany, and the USA. We discuss the design features and submission processes of the different platforms and how they generate different streams of data that governments can use to better understand e-petitioning behavior. We then suggest and illustrate different analytic tools that can be used to explore the characteristics and dynamics of e-petitioning. We conclude by suggesting that government should actively seek ways to interpret and understand this new form of participation and policy discourse.

This two-part chapter proposes a model and some design choices to build a Mass Online Deliberation (MOD) system, aimed at supporting orderly, fair, inclusive and purposeful participation of a large number of people. According to this model, a deliberation on a given issue, in a given community and at a given time (a “deliberandum”), progresses through a number of phases, roughly corresponding to ideation (moving and discussing proposals, with a proposals’ clustering algorithm operating in the background), consolidation (i.e. editing of one proposal per cluster) and reconciliation (of some among the consolidated proposals from different clusters). Depending on a given context of use, a final selection of one among the remaining irreconcilable proposals may be done by vote either among the deliberants only, or within the whole community (a referendum), or else, within a randomly selected panel of community members. The specific mechanisms defined in our model are as follows: mutual moderation and two- or three-parametric appraisal of each other’s contributions (hence without employing any staff of external moderators or facilitators); semantic clustering of a large number of proposals, performed in the background by the system and mostly based on the distribution of participants’ appraisals among contributions; and also some specific role of experts in the field, whose participation is limited to providing facts and replying to factual questions, not to actively influence participants’ opinions. Multilingual mass deliberation is discussed at the end of the Part II of the chapter.

In this Part II of the present Chapter, we describe the stages (or phases), mechanisms and procedures of a MOD process, in accordance with the requirements set forth in Section “MOD Paradigm Versus Deliberative Polling” of Part I. Our task is to provide an MOD blueprint for an ICT-based MOD platform that almost immediately lends itself to system implementation. As in Part I, we use the neologism deliberandum to refer to a given instance of mass online deliberation, that is, to a process of deliberating online within a given community, on a given issue, and within a given period of time.

Using a real-life and imagined case studies, we demonstrate how a casual, informal political conversation on social media among ordinary citizens could be transformed into a policy discourse. It is done by deconstructing the logic of discursive interactivity of online discussions. In doing so, we apply Jurgen Habermas’ validity claims to normative rightness to reveal citizens’ attitudinal positions ‘For’ and ‘Against’ certain social effects of food destruction policy of the Russian government. We measure citizens’ attitudes in the form of the discursively constructed solidarities behind each position and show the interactive process of their formation. We also build a range of interactivity models that could exploit the potential of artificial neural networks for creating new tools of discourse analytics that can capture citizens’ policy inputs in an easily understood format. The goal of such tools is seen in helping reduce deliberative disagreements by encouraging acceptance of other points of view—the core principle and ideal of deliberative democracy.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse question if, and if yes, then what potential have information technologies to solve the traditional problems of bureaucracy—tendency to inertness, to depart from the mission to serve public good and to transform into one more interests group or structure susceptible to cronyism, conflicts of interest, corruption and other irregularities. The text is also a reflection on how new forms of control over public administration, driven by ICT may change it and push it towards participatory governance based on the principles of dialogue and civic engagement.

Formal methods for measuring the impact of transformation of public services to digital transactions is an important research challenge in the non-bureaucratic government. The eGOVSIM II toolset is a prototype Web-based application aiming to provide administrations with a methodology and an information system to calculate the gains from automating and delivering interoperable services for citizens and businesses. The chapter presents the eGOVSIM II platform, which has been developed on the basis of the eGOVSIM analytical cost calculation and simulation model. It is based on the SCM and ABC methods and has extensive capabilities in capturing and measuring the various cost elements of governmental services, calculating both the cost for the administrations and the citizens or enterprises, in different levels and scenarios of automation. The eGOVSIM II platform facilitates the definition of several service provision scenarios, allowing the calculation of time, effort, and cost elements of each scenario. The chapter provides a full view of the publicly available system and its functionalities, by showcasing an application scenario testing the reengineering of public services in a Greek Public Sector organization. Results from this application and different scenarios executed in the past are showcased to provide a view on the applicability and overall value of the approach. Finally, lessons learned and future research directions for cost estimation are described.

The American citizen relationship management system 311 achieved much success in recent years. It started as a simple hotline and has evolved to a multi-channel communication system which offers a wide range of governmental services, e.g., Web self-service portals, social media, and mobile applications. In many cases, it functions as a single contact point for any issue citizens could have within their neighborhood. It is assumed to allow for quicker and easier access to non-emergency municipal services and information as well as to improve effectiveness and efficiency of governmental service delivery. However, current research on the changes in public service delivery evoked by 311 as well as the importance of different communication channels is missing. Therefore, this chapter introduces 311 systems in three American cities and exposes that the extent to which governmental service provision changed is dependent on the type of request. Considering the strong increase in the number of requests, governmental service delivery has improved in recent years. In addition, the variety of different communication channels can be assumed to be of major importance in order to reach a broad range of citizens. Besides that, the data generated by 311 allow for new opportunities in the provision of governmental information and services and have big potential for improvements in public administrations.

Digitalization refers to the adoption or increase in use of digital or computer technology by an organization, industry, country, etc. Several sources of information exist that allow the determination of the state of play as regards digitalization in Greece; Greece performs poorly in all these measurement frameworks. Greece’s strengths in relation to its ability to progress substantially with digitalization lie in its human capital; the broadband penetration and usage; and the research and development output. In contrast, its most important weaknesses are the lack of importance of ICT in the political vision and government agenda; the success of the government in pushing forward the use of ICT; the effectiveness of the judicial system in resolving business conflicts and in resolving regulation disputes; and the ineffectiveness of the public administration. In this chapter, we identify the reasons for this poor performance and attribute them to intrinsic characteristics of the political landscape in Greece, with a view toward formulating proposals for solving inherent, long-lasting problems.