[LINK] Electronic petitions to Parliament

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

On 1/03/2011 10:21 AM, Philip Argy wrote:
> John Murphy, Member for Reid, mentioned in this speech to Federal Parliament
> yesterday that electronic petitions were imminent:
> http://www.openaustralia.org/debates/?id=2011-02-28.16.1&s=speaker%3A10473#g
> 16.2 - not before time!  Surprisingly, no mention of Government 2.0 and the
> work that Kate Lundy and Pia Waugh (and many LINKers) have done in that
> space.
>
> Philip

Petitions were useful in the days when communications between the 
citizenship and the government were generally slow and non-coherent. A 
petition solved (or helped to solve) the problem of drawing the 
attention of the executive to concerns held by groups of people, the 
size of the petition being an indicator of the size of the group. It 
also brought a degree of coherence to the message.

In today's communications rich environment, does that problem still 
exist? What problem does an e-petition solve?

Anyway, those working in the field may already know about the EU - 
EuroPetition project. More details are at 
<http://itc.napier.ac.uk/ITC/ProjectInfo.asp?ID=34>.

The EuroPetition project is implementing a trans-European Local 
Authority service providing distributed citizen engagement and 
interaction with the European Parliament’s PETI Petitions Committee and 
the European Citizens' Initiative.

EuroPetition is a Local Authority provided service providing distributed 
citizen engagement and interaction with the European Parliament and 
Citizens Initiative online procedures using a proven open-source UK 
ePetitions service and experience, and building on the innovative and 
state-of-the-art Web 2.0 applications. The project will Pilot Trial the 
coordination and submission of cross-border and pan-European Citizen 
Initiative EuroPetitions from 5 regions in Spain (Andalucia), Italy 
(Vineto), the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK (England) and involving 
over 4.9 million citizens across the EU.

The project is working with clusters of Local Authorities and citizens 
in each of the 5 pilot territories to build both local and 
trans-national EuroPetitions for submission to the European Parliament 
and a Citizens Initiative to the Commission. The project aims to create 
a simple and scalable process which will build local support for 
petitions and then to migrate these to other territories to achieve 
cross-border and ultimately pan-European support.

eParticipation EU The EuroPetition project is sponsored by the European 
Commission under the eParticipation preparatory action.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com