{"id":3,"date":"2005-09-15T18:04:56","date_gmt":"2005-09-15T16:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/?p=3"},"modified":"2009-09-08T13:44:56","modified_gmt":"2009-09-08T11:44:56","slug":"steven-clift-in-amsterdam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/2005\/09\/15\/steven-clift-in-amsterdam\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Clift in Amsterdam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicus.net\/\">Steven Clift<\/a>, initiator of the political activation &amp; internet project <a href=\"http:\/\/e-democracy.org\/\">E-Democracy.org<\/a> was in Amsterdam yesterday at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publiek-politiek.nl\/\">IPP<\/a> (Institute for Public and Politics). About 15 people &#8211; amongst them researchers from Radbout University Nijmegen and the Amsterdam School of Social Research &#8211; were present to hear about the project and the way it has recently switched to an open source mail\/web-politics system.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I had met Clift before, a year or two ago, in Amsterdam, when I was still involved with &#8216;Digitale Trapvelden&#8217; (digital playgrounds). These are a kind of community neighbourhood centres that give easy acces to new information technologies to people who are normally not able to work with them.<\/p>\n<p>Clift gave us a presentation of his work with E-Democracy and IssueWeb. Some aims and strong points of IssueWeb \/ E-Democracy are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One can rapidly create a coalition about some issue online<\/li>\n<li>It helps strengthen the cnocept of civil society as opposed to a view about politics as the act of raising money around an issue or electorate<\/li>\n<li>It helps getting people with different backgrounds to join space in a &#8220;public sphere&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Some critique:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Some people post way more than others<\/li>\n<li>White middle class male is overrepresented<\/li>\n<li>Scalability of the project: how to get more cities involved?<\/li>\n<li>Very much text-based: not appealing for everybody<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It was an informative meeting. Interesting aspects for me were questions like whether these kind of initiatives are only helpful for creating coalitions amongst people that are <em>against<\/em> something (the NIMBY-effect) or also pro-something? In other words: to what extent can a resistance identity be transformed into a project identity (Castells 1996)? According to Steven Clift, certainly the majority of issues are opposing something. Nevertheless, there are also some very constructive initiatives taken on the web.<br \/>\nAnother topic I find interesting is self-presentation of politicians on the web. What is their motivation? Why do some succeed in getting across their image\/message and why do other fail?<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Clift, initiator of the political activation &amp; internet project E-Democracy.org was in Amsterdam yesterday at the IPP (Institute for Public and Politics). About 15 [&hellip;] <span class=\"read-more-link\"><a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/2005\/09\/15\/steven-clift-in-amsterdam\/\">Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6],"tags":[105,95,54],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meetingsevents","tag-democracy","tag-internet","tag-meeting"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peQgW-3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bijt.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}