e-Democracy is an incomplete project based on two other incomplete historical projects, the Internet and Democracy.

Stephen Coleman’s words sum up the entire e-Democracy ’05 event. All the attendees and speakers were really enthusiastic about both the Internet and Democracy, no one there was quite sure how to glue them together, but everyone knew that it had to happen
In his introductory speech Coleman introduced what he had identified as four key characteristics of top-down and bottom-up e-Democracy

Top down, legitimizing the process or appropriating the process?

• The appropriation of democracy – making it work for the ones on top
• Politics as a form of ecommerce. (people are buyers of politics, consumers of political packages, more of a marketing approach)
• The public as audience – broadcast, institutional aspect of it
• The replication of dull and obsolete practices – Inflicting existing processes

Characteristics of bottom up or interactive e-democracy

• Democracy as a public conversation – civilized, moderated, not hateful, meaningful
• Representation as a direct relationship – plebiscitary or ventriloquist model, we don’t need to have someone speak for us. We can do it ourselves.
• Connecting grass roots networks – mysociety, action network, netmums
• The politics of everday experience – politics can be carried out in lay language, it is a part of everyday life, not pompous like central politics.

I think that his language and attitude towards top-down were intrinsically negative, and he obviously favored the bottom-up approach. An attitude reflected by many people there
Coleman did mention briefly that top-down is about legitimizing democracy, but then talked entirely about top down approaches appropriating democratic processes for their own agenda or just “not getting it”. He characterized the top-down as not buying into pro-active changes to the process. This is a shame; it immediately puts e-Democracy into a conceptual dialectic, pitting “good” e-democracy, versus “bad” media broadcast e-democracy.
The language itself evokes this and it ignores two things. First the top down big state stuff does legitimize the process. We don’t live in some form of techno-anarchist utopia which relies on fluid, decentralized grassroots organizations deciding policy. Top down approaches help us hear and help minorities and provide a civic space to carry out democratic processes within. Secondly, that this style of broadcast government has, and still can, engage a large body of the population in democracy. (Though obviously there is a lot of debate in here about whether the public/media/government relationship intrinsically simplifies the message or not).
Admittedly a lot of this opinion is probably founded on what parts of e-Democracy and e-Government are working now. The bottom up is working very well, grassroots innovators are moving fast and using simple tools to make massive differences. This is where it is all beginning to happen. But that is not the whole picture
I feel that these characteristics of e-Democracy ought to be reworded and reformulated somewhat. This isn’t too well thought out, so I’m not wedded to the terms, but I would suggest using something more like Frameworks and Practices to refer to the two types of phenomena. Forget about bottoms and tops, we’ve got to get away from the S&M laden, power-relationship language. So reworking these two categories somewhat
Frameworks:

• Politics as a way of joining up people and politicians – Making it work for everyone
• Democracy as a forum and a marketplace – competition to form political products, consumer choice for debate
• Methods for disseminating information – TV, radio, RSS, API’s
• A place to experiment with process and practices – design, prototype, trial; use what works, throw away what doesn’t
• They should be about standardization and commonality

Practices:

• Grassroots, local and interest based connections – co-operation and collective action – (using tools like action network, pledge bank, partnership online)
• Everyday politics – The right tools and language for the job. The information you need, in the right amounts. (demos’s strategy)
• Appropriate, responsible and transparent representation – simple and direct relationships – (in the style of invlove, they work for you)
• In the hands of the people, not government – Whoa! This is probably the most difficult characteristic to get right.

Frameworks will no doubt be full of emergent complexity, Practices should be simple, understandable and easy to use. Which I’m sure some would say is the opposite of how things currently work. Like any good little disciple of Foucault I have no doubt that power relationships will creep in, but better to keep those local and mixed up rather than providing poles for the entire system to orientate around. Also the terms are probably a result of my computing/internet/project-management background
The Frameworks for Democracy, with or without the e will be difficult and slow, but worth concentrating on, worth building a vision for. The practices will and should be quick and obviously effective. Which is why people are looking at tools being or already built to support these practices as the success stories of e-Democracy and are more than rightly a little scared of tackling the bigger problems. But the right approach is not to scale-up, institutionalize, or appropriate practices; it is to provide these things with a fertile democratic loam to grow in.
Another point is not to confuse practices with tools. Social networking sites, blogs, messageboards and a whole raft of the like are tools for facilitating the practices of e-democracy, they’re not the ultimate implementation of it
And on a final note it’s not about cost effectiveness, automation or replacing real life. As someone said in yesterday’s breakout session

Democracy is not the most efficient way to make a decision, if e-Democracy was there to make things more efficient the first thing to do would be get rid of the democracy bit.