José María Moreno‐Jiménez, Cristina Pérez‐Espés and Maria Wimmer
To measure these 8 attributes, grouped in the two blocks associated to the human factor( people and society), the indicators included in Table 1 are proposed. For each indicator, a scale of five levels or categories( VG: very good; G: good; M: medium; B: bad; VB: very bad) is defined. The priorities of the attributes and those of the different levels for the scales will be obtained in the near future by means of pairwise comparison, using Thomas Saaty’ s Analytic Hierarchy Process( Saaty, 1980).
Table 1: Attributes for the evaluation of effectiveness in e‐governance experiences in the knowledge society
EFFECTIVENESS
P E R S O N S
S O C I E T Y
CONTROL( CO-DECISION)
FREEDOM( TOLERANCE)
SUBSISTENCE
COHESION
EQUITY
ATTRIBUTES
PARTICIPATION( CO-CREATION)
SOCIAL WISDOM
4. Case study
INDICATORS
% assigned to citizens in the final decison Clear traceabilty from participation to the political decisions and policy implementation Contribution of participation to citizen engagement in the democratic process / model / environment % of participation of the population contributing in the polls % of participation of population contributing in the discussions; number of messages emitted Number of political representatives engaging in the process, including meetings with the citizens Change in individual preferences % censored messages; % ideological intransigent messages Selection of the best individuals for the management of the systems; satisfaction with political leaders
Homogeneity of opinions, preferences and norms
No digital, cultural, economic and social gaps
Moral values and ethical behavior
4.1 The Cadrete project
In April 2010, the Cadrete Municipal Council, in collaboration with Zaragoza Multicriteria Decision Making Group( GDMZ), implemented a citizen participation project( https:// participa. cadrete. es) aimed at giving the residents of the municipality a voice in public policy decisions. The issue in question was the design of cultural and sporting policies. There was one objective for the GDMZ: the validation of the methodological and technological tools and two main objectives for the City Council:( i) that decisions on the budget assigned to the aforementioned policies would be conjointly made by the politicians and the citizenry;( ii) that citizens would be encouraged to involve themselves in the debate and take part in the decision making process, and more specifically, that the arguments that supported the decisions would be publicly disseminated.
Participation was encouraged by the incorporation of a new group of actors: the neighbourhood associations. There were therefore three groups of actors that were given different weightings:( i) the politicians, with a weighting of 40 %;( ii) the citizens ‐ 44 %;( iii) the local associations ‐ 16 %. The participants were local residents( on the electoral register) of over 18 years of age( politicians, citizens and representatives of the local associations). There were two voting options: with National Identity Card or with username and password. In accordance with e‐cognocracy methodology, there were two voting rounds interspersed by a forum discussion which emitted 61 messages, 37 related to cultural polices and 24 to sport. After finishing the project, participants were asked to complete an on‐line questionnaire. Only 24 residents responded and 4 of the replies were invalid. Questionnaires were considered as invalid if:( i) less than 80 % of the questions were answered; and( ii) if there was zero variability with regards to the total number of questions( Moreno‐Jiménez et al., 2012).
4.2 The effectiveness of the Cadrete e‐governance experience
Table 1 includes the attributes and indicators suggested for the evaluation of the effectiveness of e‐ governance experiences in the Knowledge Society. Unfortunately, these indicators were not available when the Cadrete experience was undertaken in April 2010. At the conclusion of the experience, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire. Based on the proposed framework, an attempt has been made to evaluate the attributes from the items used in the questionnaire – the new indicators are shown in Table 2.
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