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in Canada (K-Net) (see Beaton (2004) which was selected for government
funding as an exemplary 'Smart Community' project and which has been
extensively documented and reported.
8.6 Conclusions
The strategies presented in this chapter will establish processes for engag-
ing citizens and delivering more effective systems and services for the pub-
lic. An impressive array of techniques and tools are available to support the
strategies and these are examined in the next chapter. The know-how pre-
sented has been distilled from examining examples of citizen participation
and engagement worldwide and from developing the integrated theoretical
framework described in Chapter 7. It is likely to have resonance and rele-
vance to many people in the public sector, in e-business and in a variety of
other contexts who are actively engaged with design and delivery of ICT-
based developments for use by the general public.
Some of the individuals involved are already acutely aware of the limi-
tations of current approaches and open to the idea of doing things differ-
ently. In such cases, individuals need support and guidance, tools and
techniques, and new approaches to find and adopt appropriate new ways of
working which embrace the principle of citizen engagement. Others may
not yet be persuaded of the need for change. For example, the Demos Project,
co-funded by the European Commission, had the primary aim of increasing
and enhancing citizen participation in local government. The project linked
eight city councils in seven countries with research organisations across
Europe. One of the findings of the research was that “
the attitude of gov-
ernment officers loath to share control with citizens
” was a barrier to citi-
zen engagement (Demos 2004). These findings are not consistent with the
authors' experiences of working with local councils on e-government im-
plementations in the UK. We found local government staff working at
grass-roots in the community are committed to consulting and engaging
with citizens - especially the 'hard to hear' groups - but expressing uncer-
tainty about how to go about this and apprehensive about the adequacy of
their skills for this process.
Beyond this, for digital technologies to begin to transform lives in sig-
nificant ways on a societal scale, involves both major institutional change
and behavioural change of people. It is often the case that such changes
come about reactively as institutions and individuals strive to exploit and
accommodate new technologies in their lives. Now, in the early 21
st
cen-
tury a far more pro-active approach is within our grasp. The convergence
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