The pilot project will be trialing how ICT – and particularly the use of mobile – can play a role to support the traditional, human-centric tribal processes and enable greater local participation in democratic processes.

The originality of this project is that we do not aim at implementing an ICT tool without looking at the traditional role of chiefs in the local politics.  Rather, we want to incorporate these [ICT] tools within the traditions and not look at only online tools but the offline world as well.

About Kheira Belkacem

Kheira Belkacem is Assistant Programme Director at eGovlab, and is currently completing her PhD in Political Communication at the University of Leeds UK. Her experience in the European Parliament, when working closely with the Director General of the Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support in 2008-2009, left her with a strong expertise of parliamentary systems and adoption of new technologies in democratic institutions. She also spent a summer internship at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) on the e-Governance Programme in 2008.

In 2010, Kheira worked as a research assistant for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and in 2010-2012, she taught modules on communication theories and new media group project as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Communications Studies. She is currently the Assistant Programme Director of Botswana Speaks and is involved in other projects run by the eGovlab.

How you can use this episode

Listen to the episode

Episode links and resources

• Botswana Speaks website, on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
• The Parliament of Botswana
• eGovlab of Stockholm University / Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV)
• Gov2u
• Swedish Trade Council
• Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)

Social share with others

You can use the social sharing links at the top of the page to easily share this story with your networks. You can also follow and join in the social conversation about this episode with:

• People and organisations:
  @BotswanaSpeaks
  @bkheira
  @eGovLab
  @Gov2u
• Twitter hashtags: #botswanaspeaks #edem
  

Nicholas Gruen, economist and former chair of the Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce debates the ways in which 2.0 thinking and technologies are changing economic definitions of public goods.

In this far-ranging discussion, Nicholas explains how Gov 2.0 is a nexus between ‘Jefferson’s dream’ of the transformative potential of ideas as public goods, and ‘Schumpeter’s nightmare’ of the chaos of direct democracy.  He argues that democracy is chaos unless it’s mediated by specialists, and that the social web actually makes it harder to get the leaders we need to govern.

About Dr Nicholas Gruen

Dr Nicholas Gruen has advised two Australian Cabinet Ministers, directed the Business Council’s New Directions program and sat on the Productivity Commission. He is founder of economic policy consultancy Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. He is a frequentnewspaper columnist and media commentator and a prolific blogger at Club Troppo.

He is Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Online Opinion –an internet forum for opinion on political and cultural matters –and medical ICT startup Specialist Link. He was the founding chairman of Kaggle, a Melbourne ‘big data’ start up now based in San Francisco. He is also a board member of Sustainability Victoria and the Federal Government’s Innovation Australia.

In 2009 Nicholas chaired the Federal Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce.

How you can use this episode

Listen to the episode

Episode links and resources

• Presentation summary and slides: Realising Jefferson’s Dream, Avoiding Schumpeter’s Nightmare: Democracy, Deliberation and Government in the Age of Web 2.0’

Social share with others

You can use the social sharing links at the top of the page to easily share this story with your networks. You can also follow and join in the social conversation about this episode with:

• People and organisations:
  @NGruen1
• Tags: #edem #gov20 #democracy