It is now more than two years ago Stephen Coleman and I published Bowling Together. Stephen is in Copenhagen for a few days doing a PhD course, but I “stole” him this morning to come and speak to the members of a network of government officials and e-democracy practitioners, and have dinner plans with him tomorrow.
Stephen recently became the world’s first professor in e-democracy, and now resides at Oxford Internet Institute, which is doing a lot of interesting stuff.
Although I try to follow the e-democracy debates, I have basically not been actively working with e-democracy since Bowling Together, so I have a lot of catching up to do, because I understand from Stephen that the agenda has moved on, although much slower than even the sceptics assumed. With the exception of e-voting of course (which many sees as central to e-democracy, but I see as the least interesting part of it …).
On related news: Last week, The Ecomomist ran a special feature called Digital dilemmas, where I found this quote: The biggest decisions about the internet’s future will be political and social, not technological. How true.
I found the economist.com link in a blog entry by James Crabtree, who has some good comments on the article.
