Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli
The real challenge for governments is, therefore, to coordinate these different voices in order to reach collective decisions that are an expression of general interest. In recent years 1 many examples have shown that the government can promote transparency, accountability and participation using new media tools. This is a new way to interpret the processes of government that sees not only the empowerment in the bureaucratic component, but also empowerment in the city itself, which has different tools to optimize the approach with the government, becoming a mechanism from collective complaint to collective action( Lathrop and Ruma 2010).
“ Digital civics” is a concept that refers to a set of digital tools that are designed for and centered around social interaction. Digital civics aim to foster civic engagement, participation, transparency and accountability. 2 These tools can be considered as the technological infrastructure for a potential new form of democracy that strengthens the social bonds within a community and its value for the co‐production of public policies. Digital civics overcome the traditional boundaries of time and space for government and other political processes, which have traditionally involved physical attendance or slow input‐seeking procedures.
Each digital civic technology has its own architecture that shapes the types of interactions that can occur( Lessig 2010), however, all together they could help to reduce the barriers of representative democracy, empowering the citizen, fostering an interactive dialog and a sharing framework between governments, people, communities. Digital civics also challenge political stakeholders( parties, institutions and civic society), who need to reshape the relationships between governments and communities, because the boundary between them becomes less clear.
So far, however, digital civics have shown a number of difficulties: 1) difficulties in sustaining long‐term projects and reasoned deliberation; 2) difficulties in getting public sphere’ s attention and 3) difficulties in reducing the gap between who knows how to use the new technologies and have access to them and who do not. Besides these difficulties, in order to promote digital civics, a good level of trust among the political actors is necessary. The use of Internet services and applications is often a situation that requires trust since, in many cases, we are interacting with people that we have never met in person. Reputation has gained attention as a social mechanisms that can be used to create trust in online communities. Some authors talk about“ the reputation society”( Massum and Tovey 2012), a society that leverages the high diffusion of reputation systems to promote positive changes. However, a key problem is the proliferation of reputation systems. Different reputation systems in digital civics could hinder collaboration and stifle participation. A further problem is that many reputation systems designed for the sharing economy are not properly suited to e‐ governance processes, because they are denying a shared framework, compulsory in the digital public sphere.
What is the possible solution to build effective reputation systems for digital civics then? Because reputation is highly context and platform dependent how different initiatives can join efforts? Furthermore, how is possible to overcome the limits of current reputation systems used nowadays in digital civics? A possible option is to imagine a " civic reputation” shared by many digital civics: a reputation mechanisms that traces of actions performed online through digital civics and that is able to provide a shared framework supporting the various processes of participation and transparency. While several solutions could be envisioned, we propose a possible direction. A growing phenomenon for assessing and displaying reputation for web users are digital badges. Badges, we believe, can foster the creation of a civic web ecosystem based on trust. Badges can act as effective representations of contributions of participants in digital civics.
Certainly if each digital civics come up with its own badge system, the problem of proliferation of reputation systems will not be addressed. In this paper we trace some idea for a general system of digital civics badges that could be shared by several initiatives. Our model consider firstly a“ lean federation” of several digital civics via the concept of“ web‐of‐trust”: a decentralized trust model in which peers authenticate each other as trustworthy. This federation of“ digital civics” will then share a common set of badges representing reputation for participants( citizens, associations, companies, government) in the bottom‐up democratic process. Furthermore, our model takes advantage of the Mozilla Open Badge project which provides a technical Open Source infrastructure for issuing and displaying badges in a standardized way. With a federation of digital civics, a unique and shared badge system and an open infrastructure granting a standardized issuing and 1
See paragraph 2: The rising of Digital Civics 2 See http:// www. ethanzuckerman. com / blog / 2012 / 08 / 30 / understanding‐digital‐civics /
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