Two Web-based Australian Experiments in Electronic Democracy. Electronic democracy must avoid the pitfalls of direct democracy, which can diminish the necessary information sharing and background debate. Instead, it must offer full interactivity.
A framework is proposed for conceptualising uses of interactive technology across scales. The first part of the paper considers a generic definition of democracy and relates this to the pluralising potential of interactive technology, as an extension of complexity theory. In this view, the added voices of electronic democracy are the ‘butterflies’ of chaos theory, creating widespread but unpredictable effects. Technology use at different level is linked by the values of the dominant actors.
