[Air-L] CFP: Participatory online politics and the future of e-democracy (DG.O 2021)

[Zach Bastick]

Hi everyone,

If you are working on democracy, governance, and the internet, I am pleased
to invite you to contribute a paper to our conference track for DG.O 2021.
The track is focused on futuristic, alternative, and radical perspectives
on how the internet can support or harm the ways in which we govern
society.

All accepted papers will be published and included in the ACM digital
library and the DBLP bibliography system. In addition, we are planning a
special issue in a leading journal for our specific track. The deadline for
submitting papers is January 20, 2021 – and be sure to submit to the
correct track (Track 6 Beyond Bureaucracy: Participatory Online Politics
and the Future of E-democracy). The full call for papers is below.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!

Regards,
Dr. Zach Bastick
Researcher in Digital Government
European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL), France


*Call for Papers*
Track 6: Beyond Bureaucracy: Participatory online politics and the future
of e-democracy
Track chairs: Zach Bastick (ESPOL) and Alois Paulin (Siemens)
22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DG.O
2021)
June 9-11, 2021, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska, USA

Description:

This track explores innovations in e-government and e-democracy that place
the citizen at the center of governance. While traditional lines of inquiry
at the intersection of politics and technology focus on enhancing or
supporting existing political institutions, there is an underexplored
opportunity for citizens to use technology to control government more
directly. Internet optimists have long anticipated new, digital models of
self-governance. These include representative, direct, liquid, and anarchic
models. On the other hand, critics have argued that technology cannot
safely or desirably support greater citizen involvement. This track serves
to explore these more futuristic potentials of technology for governance.

The track covers all aspects of direct, futuristic, radical, exploratory,
and critical approaches to digital governance. These include the
(un)desirability of using technology to support self-governance; challenges
to self-governance through technology; theoretical and empirical proposals;
assessments of technologies to support models of governance (AI, IoT,
blockchain, 5G, platforms); the impact of developing digital phenomena on
self-governance (misinformation, bots, digital collective intelligence);
and the ethical, technological, social, and political implications of
existing and potential future models of public governance. In short, the
track is specifically interested in how the latest technological
developments and theories can enable new or renewed political structures
and processes.

More generally, we will explore questions such as: What might a digital
political future look like? How might we control or steer providers of
societal functions and deliver societal functions through technology? How
can digital governance occur collaboratively and enable public values to
emerge? What digital issues should policymakers, platforms, designers,
internet users and citizens consider when imagining the future of democracy?

Suggested topics include:

   1. Algorithmic governance and politics
   2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and policymaking
   3. Governance of online communities and virtual organizations
   4. Collaborative, community-led or inclusive online government
   5. Human, crowd, and machine intelligence in the service of democracy
   6. Governance and bots, misinformation, and algorithmic obscurity
   7. The (un)desirability of governance through technology
   8. Representative democracy, liquid democracy, crypto-anarchism, direct
   democracy
   9. Ethics and morals in digital governance
   10. Participatory budgeting
   11. Collaborative, bottom-up or grass-roots digital responses to
   COVID-19

We solicit papers on a wide range of perspectives and approaches and
encourage both theoretical and empirical contributions. Papers are to be
submitted at the following website by January 20, 2021:
http://dgsociety.org/dgo-2021/call-for-proposals/