Introduction - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 6

3. active participation: a relation based on partnership with government,
in which citizens actively engage in the decision and policy-making
process (OECD 2001).
As Hashagan (2002) points out, engagement “ suggests that there is a
'governance' system and a 'community' system. To build the collaborative
relationships on which a complex activity such as community planning
would depend, it is necessary for the governance system to fully under-
stand the dynamics of the communities with which it seeks to work, and to
be prepared to adapt and develop structures and processes to make them
accessible and relevant to those communities. In this way, the term 'en-
gagement' warns us against making assumptions about communities: it
asks for dialogue. It also implies that the development of the relationship
itself will need to be a focus for attention: 'government' will need to en-
gage with communities as well as asking communities to engage with it ”.
Our understanding of the term technology has changed over the centu-
ries. Winner (1977) notes that the term was used in the 18 th and 19 th centu-
ries to refer to machines, tools, factories, industry, craft and engineering.
Today the term is used to refer to a much wider collection of phenomena
“ tools, instruments, machines, organizations, methods, techniques, systems
and the totality of all these things in our experience ” (Winner 1977). He
further notes that so broad an interpretation risks becoming meaningless.
Berniker (1983) states that technology can be understood as a “ body of
knowledge about the cause and effect relations of our actions and of the
machines and processes we build ” , and proposes that technical systems are
artefacts, “ sets of tools (equipment, facilities, and computers) as well as
methods (procedures, programmes, and software) all designed as a system
to accomplish that transformation required by an organization ”. This is
the way in which we use the term technology, although significantly for
our purposes, we must emphasize that the transformations involved could
be required not only by organisations, but by individual citizens, commu-
nities and civic society as a whole. As Castells (1996) says, “ technology
(or the lack of it) embodies the capacity of societies to transform them-
selves, as well as the uses to which societies, always in a conflictive proc-
ess, decide to put their technological potential ”.
Specifically, we refer throughout the text to ICT, meaning the building
blocks of the networked world. ICTs include telecommunications tech-
nologies, such as telephony, cable, satellite and radio, as well as digital
technologies such as computers, information networks and software.