Darebin eForum Report

Abstract

This report provides an assessment of the pilot electronic democracy project undertaken at Darebin City Council during 2004. The Darebin eForum provided Council staff and Darebin residents the opportunity to discuss policy related issues via electronic mail in a structured manner which allowed the Council to summarise topics of interest and concern to feed into pre-existing decision-making processes. Based on research conducted with participants during the pilot project, a number of conclusions can be drawn regarding the value and future viability of the online forum. These are: The pilot project did not attract a wide number of participants from outside of the Council organisation and participants reflected a relatively narrow slice of the diversity within the City of Darebin. Overall, the average eForum participant was a forty-year-old English speaking, educated, and computer literate woman in full time employment. These participants tended to exhibit characteristics that would classify them as joiners who tend to be in well-developed social and work networks, and tend to have a consociational and communitarian outlook, who would therefore be attracted to discussion lists of this type. This finding indicates that the work of recruitment for the eForum of residence of the city needs to be a priority for future iterations or implementations of this concept. The selection of topics for discussion on the eForum allowed discussion to develop amongst the list participants, even where some topics were outside of the specific knowledge for interest of members. This was advantageous in the development of an active group of participants as topics were inclusive of participation across a number of levels. The selection of topics, however, may have been overly broad and fail to deliver instrumental outcomes either to participating staff members with responsibility for policy development, or a reasonable minority of non-staff list participants who focus their interest