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PeDiL

What is PeDiL?

Practical e-Democracy in London (PeDiL) is an Invest to Save Budget 5 project. It is funded by the Treasury and led by Camden in partnership with the Greater London Authority, London Connects, and Professor Stephen Coleman of the University of Leeds.

Aims
The overall aims of the project are:

  • to enable citizens to generate their own democratic debate
  • to enable administrations to consult effectively using online means
  • to enable councillors to work effectively online

Products
PeDiL delivers four products:

  • Community Network tool
  • Councillor Tools
  • Online Citizens Panel
  • Research

Community
Camdennet was PeDiL’s first community publishing tool. Since then the technology has been improved and all Camdennet community groups have been moved to CASweb to join Voluntary Advice Agency sites. These sites provide:

  • news, articles, events, classifieds, photo gallery, survey, forums and file storage.
  • an estimated saving per community group of £10K
  • administrator training run every six months
  • the tool has been taken by the ODPM and launched as part of the VOICE Toolkit.

PeDiL provided Camden’s citizens panel CamdenTalks with the dotConsult online consultation tool built with input from Professor Stephen Coleman. The consultation tool consists of surveys and forums and allow administrations to consult effectively using online means.

PeDiL has worked with the CamdenTalks citizens panel from the start of the project, running:

  • two deliberative consultation exercises: Strength in Diversity; Camden Community Strategy 2006-2011
  • a research study on e-Participation
  • training in UKOnline Centres for those who don’t have internet access.

Early results show a high representation of the disabled, and an increasing elderly and BMI community participation level.

The results of the consultations and exercises will be available as part of the Research material produced in PeDiL.

Councillor's Toolkit
With increasing pressures on time and mobility, PeDiL provides Councillors with an easy to use tool that will help them manage their own web presence. The toolkit will allow Councillors to communicate with constituents who are otherwise unable to attend surgeries or meetings, providing tools that include:

  • news; calendar; blog; photo gallery; email-to-blog publishing; an ‘About Me’ page.
  • online Councillor surgery - utilising instant messaging software to enable councillors to conduct surgeries online.

Research
The evaluation work of Professor Stephen Coleman will be made widely available through PeDiL in the form of:

  • a paper outlining the rationale for PeDiL and how it fits into other e-Democracy applications.
  • analysis of the applications - including an analysis of CamdenTalks exercises run in September 2004, October 2005 and March 2006.
  • public research on what people believe should be done to connect them with representative process.

All tools have been developed in OpenACS as open source software and are freely available under a GNU Public Licence.

For more information contact the e-services development team

Contacts