Excuse my technoliberal stance but the digital divide debate uses a certain communication pattern that does work politically but leads to inefficient actions (or no effects at all). During the last 30-40 years you find iterations of the same communication pattern in literature and politics. Basically it works like this. Technological innovation x is made and gets adopted by a share of n % the population with gigantic socioeconomical effects. Technologists are enthusiatic, other see the main problem in a divide between n and (1-n) is constructed, the have and the have nots. A problem of course that would not exist if none of the population had the technology which is mistaken for the cause of the "divide".
There are many examples that show why the focus has to be on the inherent social effects of the technology, not the late adoptors (for whom you can provide paternalistic educational proposals and awareness raising which are an easy sell by the consulting industry).
One example is cell phones. Rather than to "create a divide" cell phones ensured phone penetration in Africa which would never have reached with fix line investments. Certainly there was a transition period where some people could not afford a cell phone. The potential of the technology was to close a "divide" which indeed happened.
The question is always who owns the process and what is at stake. I think the best thing to do is to take an existing political process, e.g. a parliament report and then ensure better citizen input to the actual deliberations. But e.g. often administrations start procedures to consult citizens where nothing is at stake as part of the process, as a process of its own.
There are often deliberations and consultations but the question is of course if the process means a thing. E.g. do we have a hearing in the parliament organised by a polticial group to an actual battle in parliament or do we have a "Citizen summit" as a sandbox event to experiment with deliberative democracy and the outcome will be a declaration paper. Esp. UN bodies have great experience to consults people to death and thus waste the precious time of civil society.
The UN is no "standard body". And CEN is a dinosaur of the EU regulatory framework with no significant impact on technology development.
Most relevant "standards" for the net are from consortia like W3C, OASIS.
It is therefore useful to use the term "standards and specifications", given that the EU has a very narrow harmonised definition of the word "standard" from a directive of the 80ths that was never modernised since.
In my opinion the development of technologies is the main driver, not the reform of people.
E.g. four years ago I was part of a civil society campaign but blogs were not widespread yet. Today, campaigning would be far easier.
There is a tendency in e-democracy debate to focus on education of people rather than the advancement of technological enabling infrastructure.
For instance this commenting tool is excellent. I was looking for something like this for long. Once it is there, the whole environment changes. Just think of how the availability of Youtube changes the US elections or of new tools like Slideshare.net. People use what serves their needs. You don't need to focus limited resources on edcucation of citizens on "how to use Youtube" etc. Citizens are smart and the crowds will penetrate the new technology with some early adopters. In technology it is enough to make the tools available for the "alphas" and then see them mainstreamed when they are good.
what is meant with Trust (whose trust, whom is trusted?). I guess It comes from the e-voting machines discourse where it is indeed crucial. Otherwise an advantage of open source is the support of re-use and incredemental improvement, horizontal dissemination of technology.
It is crucial that deliberations are not held in umimportant places beyond the political process. A debate without power does not make sense. E-democracy needs to be attached to actual policy making.
I think this is a common misconception in e-Democracy debates. The idea is that the current system has a representation problem but it results in an anti-parliament bias where in fact the measures are designed to strengthen parliament and the scope of the control it exercises. Many naive persons in e-Democracy debates regard the control body, parliament, as the suboptimal institution and oversee the larger institutional concert.
