Citizen Engagement in Practice - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 48

examples from 10 different countries, and by choosing examples which are
illustrative of the kinds of activities which are being undertaken. Regard-
ing the many initiatives that aim to develop low cost, sustainable ICT (viz.
“ the $100 laptop ” - Negroponte 2005) for the benefit of disadvantaged
communities, we have included two examples (Nepal Wireless and Jhai
Foundation). There are of course many other examples, but the aim here is
to highlight citizen engagement/participation aspects. For this reason we
have not included case studies of telecentres. Although these are a com-
mon approach to providing ICT at the community level, evaluative reports
suggest that in general these appear to be introduced without taking due
account of the needs of community members or aspects of the local con-
text.
We have developed a framework to present the case material in a way
which enables comparisons to be made and conclusions to be drawn. There
are many ways of characterizing and classifying citizen engagement. One
classification which has been widely used is the three stage model of levels
of involvement (OECD 2001), which we have already outlined in Chapter
1. Another way in which citizen engagement has been classified in the lit-
erature is by the role of the technology. Macintosh et al. (2004), describe
three different ways in which technology can support participation. The
first is in an e-enabling role where the technology provides support for
those who do not typically access the Internet. This means a wider audi-
ence can be reached (using a range of technologies to cater for the diverse
technical and communicative skills of citizens). It also serves to provide
participants with relevant and useful information in an accessible format.
The second is e-engaging where a wider audience can be consulted to al-
low for deeper contributions and to support deliberative debate on policy
issues. The third is e-empowering in which technology supports active par-
ticipation and facilitates bottom-up generation of ideas to influence agen-
das. E-enabling and e-engaging provide for “ user access to information
and reaction to government led initiatives .” E-empowerment on the other
hand sees citizens emerging as producers, rather than just consumers of
policy: “ here there is recognition that there is a need to allow citizens to
influence and participate in policy formulation ”.
For our purposes, these two descriptors - level of involvement and use
of technology - are useful but not central to our theme. Since the focus of
this topic is on citizen engagement, the classification by level of engage-
ment was used to discard case studies where there was little or no reported
engagement. Regarding the role of technology, the processes and mecha-
nisms of participation are clearly important, but our interest is not so much
in the way in which technology has been used as part of the engagement,