Digital Democracy

Before I began this assignment, I didn’t really know what digital democracy was. It is basically the use to technology and media to get people involved with government issues. I found this definition from this website that makes sense to me:

“Digital democracy here refers to the use of digital communication technologies to enhance the democratic process by, among other things, making the process more accessible, increasing and enhancing citizen participation in public policy decision making, and increasing government transparency and accountability.”

I came across this website called digital-democracy.org and their company provides tools to community leaders so they can help get other people in their communities get involved with public policy issues (Digital Democracy). Their three goals for their company are:

1. Direct Implementation: We train communities to use basic digital tools, such as cameras, mobile phones, and online maps. Our tiered approach emphasizes digital literacy, digital organizing and digital governance.
2. Tool Building: We create tech solutions to empower our partners and help them adapt existing tools to their needs. We also work with digital innovators to develop and implement new open-source tools.
3. Local-to-Global Engagement: We scale our impact beyond our direct partners. Through events, workshops, and tool-kits, we build bridges between our work and the work of advocates and decision-makers around the world (Digital Democracy).

In 2010, the company paired with an app called Extraordinaries and people could volunteer time through this app to help people who were suffering from the earthquake in Haiti (Digital Democracy). The company has also provided Chiapas, Mexico with a variety of media technology to document what happens in their daily life, as well as what goes in with their government, and also to communicate outside of their village. The company also runs a blog to keep readers up to date with what is going in the world (Digital Democracy).

I like that this company uses media to help people become more involved not only in the United States, but other countries as well. They have all kinds of videos and photos and news and events on their website to get people involved. They have a Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/digidemocracy) that people can 'like' and they post more news and links to other digital democracy related websites.

Bibliography

Digital Democracy. 14 November 2012 <http://networkedpublics.org/digital_democracy>.

Digital Democracy. 14 November 2012 <http://digital-democracy.org/>.