Universit Ca' Foscari di Venezia Course: Advanced Management Studies, A.Y.

2011/2012, Term 2

Towards a Social Government?

How could we build e-democracy through Internet Social Networks and how would such a system change our view about Civil Society functioning Santagiustina Carlo R. M. A. 811360 carlosantagiustina@msn.com

ABSTRACT
This paper deals with the use of Internet Social Networks (ISNs) as potential instruments for the diffusion of e-democracy, for the development of an active citizenship way of life and for the empowerment of local communities through participation to political and administrative decision making process. We will try to understand if ISN e-democracy platforms can potentially become decision making quasi-markets were participative public decision making is a Social Capital exchange and accumulating instrument for participants. To make an adherent to reality investigation, the paper will be constructed upon concrete initiatives and cases, most of them are from Italy. Case studies that have been chosen are running prototypes or work(s) in progress, thus, involved citizens are often newcomers in the world of e-democracy, and, most of them still arent e-democracy believers. Consequently, participants are at the moment assessing those initiatives and discussing about opportunities and threats of using the internet and ISN to build participative governance. Public debate around e-democracy themes emerge principally during the genesis of a ISN project, therefore opinions and ideas are clearly visible and thus valuable only in this early conceptualization moment. Generally, once the method, content and instruments of a e-democracy platform on ISN are determined, aligned to method, content and instruments people continue to participate. While, unfortunately, citizens that are non-aligned to instruments, methods or content often abandon the initiative together with their ideas and alternative views about e-democracy through ISN, it is also those views that we will try to capture in this paper. With the hope of building an e-democracy up to the hopes of its most sincere supporters.

government, e-participation, Civil Society, embeddedness, community, social preferences.

Keywords: Social Network, Social Capital, Networked Governance, e-democracy, e-

INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there has been a radical reinterpretation of citizens role in policy making and service delivery (Meijer A. J., 2011). As Bovaird T. (2007) correctly observed policy making is no longer seen as a purely top-down process but rather as a negotiation among many interacting policy systems. In contrast to the mainstream widespread idea about the characteristics of e-democracy (as it is described on our knowledge network Wikipedia), allinclusive civil society involvement in e-participation projects is a necessary but insufficient condition for building a Networked Governance model that would be able to correctly and objectively represent community members otherwise unobservable preferences; because edemocracy platforms methods, formats and instruments for interaction with public administrations can alter or influence the preferences expression of individuals. Furthermore, if e-democracy and participative governance wants to be, thanks to the forthcoming Gov 2.0 revolution (Microsoft Corporation, 2009), an improvement of representative democracy towards the future achievement of direct democracy: perfectly representative of a community social optimum. Then, all citizens should have an equal opportunity of being regarded in the decision making process and thus determine its outcome. Moreover, if we aspire to recognize the social and political optimum in a community, assuming that the abovementioned social optimum truly exists, all individuals should express themselves without being influenced or induced by social and relational context to adjust social preferences, publicly spoken or written. However, platforms of interactions of edemocracy initiatives are by definition open, transparent, multilateral; thus, individuals interact with the public administration and other citizens at the same time, sharing publicly opinions and ideas. Openness and transparency has been considered desirable because administrations wants citizens to be able to evaluate others needs, ideas and opinions to collectively build alternative solutions to social problems and needs, and only then give the possibility to citizens to choose between them. For this reason, citizens become recognizable in their participative activity by other members of their community, groups and clubs. Consequently, individuals could be tacitly blackmailed or induced to change opinion or to conceal it, if they know in advance that the expression of a given idea or opinion would cause them losses of social capital (relationships with other actors and accompanying access to resources, information, influence and control) within the community or with groups, clubs and individuals that dislike that idea/opinion or its consequences if expressed. In the same way, publicness of political and administrative preferences, ideas and opinions, encourages, by means of positive social capital incentives, more skilled individuals to express opinions and sustain ideas that would help them most to build and improve their relational positioning within the community, groups, clubs and other individuals with whom they want to tighten a social relation, creating and accumulating by those means new social capital, that could be in future spent (exchanged for favors) in the same way that nowadays we spend money for goods. The above mentioned emerging attribute of participative democracy, that is particularly apparent when using small ISN platforms for e-democracy, is very similar to the social embeddedness of goods/service markets. Consequently we will start our investigation trying explaining how social relations networks can influence the outcomes of an e-democracy decision making process, we will subsequently show how an e-democracy public decision

making initiatives can become in this way a social capital market and investment system. For the author, this characteristic of participative democracy through ISN is key to analyze and appreciate the functioning of any e-democracy initiative. Consequently the core problematic of this paper will be understanding how and why a citizen, as a member of a community with a particular social positioning(s), role(s) and link(s) within it, should (according to the Public Administration that decides to take into account his opinion), would privately wont to (given his hidden social preferences) and concretely does (given the consideration of his role and relations within the community and his research of improving his social positioning) participate and express some social preferences in a e-democracy initiative through a ISN, and which are the rewards that one can obtain for his participative effort. Afterwards, we will try to understand if most popular existing ISN can be used by citizens and public administrations to construct participated governance for complex People System. Since we will be talking about la raison dtre and la raison dapparatre of citizens social preferences, ideas and opinions, that publicly emerge through the use of a ISN for e-democracy purposes, we consider fundamental for our analysis, to interpret how the image, the historical role, the typical content and the standing of a ISN and individuals that act within it, can influence both: The choice of other individuals to participate or not to the e-democracy initiative on that ISN. The preferences, ideas and opinions expressed by individuals while participating and interacting with government or other citizens through that ISN;

Moreover, we will try to understand if existing ISN can be used as pools of users for pre-edemocracy tokenistic interactions between public institutions and citizens, for building participative democracy and diffusing its understructure of values, and if ISN will determine the success of the concept of internet-based networked governance and its future implementation. Finally we will describe the first outcomes of our attempt of civil society mobilization for e-democracy through ISN, that has been done through a page on Facebook called: Cittadini Italian: Governiamoci con I Social Network (Italian Citizens: Lets govern ourselves through Social Networks), the initiative has a double purpose: -First phase. Create debate around the theme of: using existing ISN to interact with the public administrations, and participate to their decision making activities. The aim of this first part was principally to receive feedbacks from citizens for drawing up this paper and understand social attitude of Facebook users towards such a use of this instrument; -Second phase. Give to citizens the instruments and cultural knowledge needed to put pressure on public institutions for implementing e-democracy on the already existing ISN. This second part is still in an early phase of development. Since our study will give priority to local initiatives: Where civil society determines or at least is involved in the definition of the online-systems, platforms instruments and formats of interaction with the public institution; Particular attention will be given to some e-democracy initiatives that emerged from Italian local communities has symptom of the need and wish of citizens for being involved in public decision making process, this part has been done thanks to the advice of Antonino Mola, member of the directive board of Veneto Region Computer Systems for E-Government, we thank him for his help.

E-DEMOCRACY AS A DECISION MAKING QUASI-MARKET WITH SOCIAL CAPITAL AS THE EXCHANGE CURRENCY
How far are we from the shared-power, no-one-in-charge World described by Crosby B. C. and Bryson J. M. (2005)? During the last two decades governments and civil society have begun to foresee how participation does not have to be only in government, as it is already constructed but also with government in new, collaborative arrangements, some of which might involve government communicating priorities and people taking action in civil society in response. (Noveck B. S., 2010) This reinvention of the civil societys role must try to benefit as much as possible from ICT to build and reinforce the interactions within civil society and with public institutions, in brief there is a need of building relational networks for active participation to governance. But how should this participative networks look like? For us those networks should be social (ISN) in the following sense: When a computer connects people, it is a social network. Just as a computer network is a set of machines connected by a set of cables, a social network is a set of people connected by a set of socially meaningful relationships. Computer networks are well configured to support participation in sparse, unbounded networks. Since the sixties there has been a paradigm shift from definitions (of civil society) in terms of locality and solidarity and towards definitions in terms of social networks (and social capital). Computer supported social networks affect the behavior of people using them and the social systems in which these networks are embedded. Such communities are ramified and complex networks of kin, friends, workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighborhoods. The members of loosely-bounded (or unbounded) networks have many ties with people who are not members of those particular networks. Their orientation to those networks will not be so intense. Because so many ties go outside the network, it is likely that the network will be sparsely-knit. (Moreover) not only do networks link people, they link groups, for when ties connect two groups, they provide intergroup as well as interpersonal links. (Wellman B., 1996)

For whom studies social interactions, the main difference between the abovementioned ISNs and Internet Groups (IGs), is that in the first case (ISNs) people do not necessarily know membership and boundaries of the system, while in the second case (IGs) we assume that they do know or at least can know which are the boundaries and who are the members. ISNs boundaries are supposed to be open to newcomers and their frontier of participation and membership is thus hardly definable, if not in a static model that freezes reality; only in this case a ISN can be studied has an IG or multiple IGs sharing the same internet platform. People who tend to see small village-like, bounded and highly interconnected groups as the desirable form of living community and fear instable relations should use small IGs, whereas for who wants to feel free of quickly shifting from an interlocutor to another on a problematicdriven way, big ISNs should be preferred. In reality, many ISN platforms host both ISNs and IGs, by giving to users the possibility to discriminate access to different information published on the platform, in this was an unique ISN platform can attract wider publics and congregate multiple ISNs and IGs at the same time. Consequently Social Networks are scalable as networks of networks: interpersonal, intergroup, interorganizational and international (Wellman B., 1996). Moreover, through his research Eger J. (1997) has acknowledged that

within e-democracy initiatives, Teams, clans, and networks are woven by empathy and trust, and on their capacity to ensure that partners would be able to do better together than in isolation. Such networking has emerged naturally among persons sharing some sort of proximity, and it has had to materialize rather quickly in the form of fruitful results from such cooperation to ensure that it would survive. This dual constraint (proximity and collaboration bearing fruits) has led to the rise of community as the locus of such creative interaction and to the emergence of an effective mobilization of skills and competencies in real time as the sine qua non of the resilience of the network. The notion of collective intelligence is a way to capture this mobilization effect and the nurturing of continuous learning that it generates. The notion of smart community refers to the locus in which such networked intelligence is embedded. A smart community is defined as a geographical area ranging in size from a neighborhood to a multicounty region within which citizens, organizations, and governing institutions deploy an NICT to transform their region in significant and fundamental ways. Now lets see through some real cases how abovementioned characteristics of ISN platforms and Smart Communities emerge or not in Italian local e-democracy initiatives :

Terzo Veneto This e-democracy platform has been developed directly by the Veneto Region to offer to citizens public listening, dialogue instruments and the operational resources needed to enable the usercitizen to elaborate proposals, correctly formulate their opinion and finally asses the quality of administrative action within the Veneto Region. It is structured in the following way:

Terzo Veneto

Demotopia

Coro

Civil Life

Wikimap

E-Dem. Lab

Cosultations

Surveys

Civil Game

Civil Life Lab

Demotopia: is designed to be a co-developing and co-designing portal for the proactive participation of citizens in the government of their Region. To widen the public debate on sustainable development projects within the territory and planning activity issues. Moreover it helps engaged Citizens to find sustainers and partners within their local communities that share the same degree of devotion to participative democracy related topics. Wikimap: This portal use a google map window to localize e-democracy initiatives, anyone can locate on the map his local e-democracy initiative, adding a brief descriptions of its nature and his promoters, with a direct link to the official page of his e-democracy project. E-Democracy Lab: this page has been developed on Ning ISN platform, to give citizens the possibility to participate to the elaboration of projects and planning activity of the Veneto Region, and to discuss with others about e-democracy related topics. To begin participative activity you need to subscribe and be accepted by the administrators of the portal, during this phase users are asked to motivate the reasons of their request for membership and their desired level of involvement in e-democracy projects in this ISN, at the moment this network has 133 members, most of them claim to be Engaged Citizens or Professional Experts in e-democracy initiatives.

Coro: is designed to build participation of citizens and stakeholders to legislative activity of the Veneto Region, moreover it offers to most relevant stakeholders (like unions and representatives of professional categories) the possibility to participate more actively, in a non tokenistic way, in the formulation of new laws, by comments and suggestions of changes to draft (Regional) Laws. Consultations: Main stakeholders are directly involved in Regional Law drafting, their comments and suggestions of changes to law are visible to all public, in this way unions and category representatives lobbying Regional Government and Parliament become visible to all citizens. Surveys: Any stakeholder (person or institution), after subscribing can participate to surveys made by Veneto Regional Parliament that is organized in seven thematic commissions. The answers to past surveys are archived on a dedicated area and are made available to the public.

Civil Life: is designed for the participation to governance activity of younger generations, to help them develop a sense of responsibility towards community interest related issues. It also aims to develop a strong sense of belonging and thus identification with civil society for democractivation of students. Civil Game: Through a videogame young users can identify themselves with virtuous politicians that desire to develop an electoral campaign program in agreement with their communities of supporters, obviously to win the elections. Civil Life Lab: wants to develop projects of e-democracy within schools through the interaction of a social community composed of teachers, parents and students with the Veneto Region. At the moment this ISN community has 144 members.

Via Per Via: La Citt che Partecipa Started in 2010, this project tries to promote active citizenship and social inclusion in the city of Modena (Italy). For this purpose the city has been devised in four circumscriptions, within each circumscription the traditionally most inactive social categories (young people and migrants) are asked through ISN to participate and be involved in a urban recovery project in one of the four circumscriptions of the city. The goals of this initiatives are: 1. Enable citizens and associations to take care of their territory, through a participative journey with shared rules that foster the so called microprogettualit diffusa (namely diffused micro-planning). 2. Debate and tackle territory problems, by creating public spaces in which people can meet, face each other, find an agreement and shared solutions. 3. Make more user friendly the management and governance of public spaces and goods. To re-approach citizens to collective issues, and last but not least, tie civil society participation to public decision making, starting from the nearest to citizens level of community governance: the Circumscriptions. Only projects that aim to increase the involvement and social inclusion of young people and migrants in the local circumscription community can be proposed. The ones who want to submit a proposal must fill a standardized project paper online. To each proposal group will be granted a volunteer facilitator that is a professionalized Public Governance expert that will be in charge of helping citizens and thus enable the realization of the project. Finally technical and legal feasibility as well as financial sustainability will be evaluated before the final approval of the project by City Council Circumscriptions Commissions.

Etucosacivedi San Giobbe

This e-democracy initiative is organized through a partnership between the City of Venice and the C Foscari University, the aim of this initiative is to redesign the San Giobbe district, more precisely a new open to public area of the Business School of C Foscari. This initiative will be an opportunity for all citizens of the district to re-invent its social and cultural organization and content with the other goers of the district: the students of the Business School, in a shared and participative way, to shape the environment to needs and improve the quality of life for all its potential users. Even if this project isnt running already, it will officially start in January 2012, we already know how it has been designed to function, and which are the instruments that it shall use.

The two interaction platforms on ISN of the initiative are already functioning: The page on Facebook: will be used to directly interact with interested users, it allows visitors to post opinions, send compiled postcard questionnaires of the initiative, and videos. Moreover it gives basic indications about the state of the project. It could be also use for surveys. The page on Twitter: The micro blogging updates on twitter keep citizens in touch with the project, giving them updates about events, meetings, dates of release of new contents for participating to the initiative. Moreover, there is a e-mail address that is already active to answer citizen questions about how to participate the project. In the first phase the interaction with citizens will be very simple and standardized, thanks to the utilization of the questionnaire that you can see on the left side this page (click on it while pressing Ctrl to see it I high resolution). More involving events such as community walks through the district, laboratories for preparing proposals of projects and meetings to choose the destination of public spaces and plan the implementation of the final projects.

Now that we have descried those projects, we should ask ourselves if the abovementioned communities are SMART or fragmented? If they emerged before the participative project or already existed? If their relational structure and power equilibriums changed during the initiative? If the composition of those communities differs from the classical political pressure groups ones, that emerged spontaneously in the past five decades from civil society to lobby political decision making? Unfortunately at the moment those are unanswerable questions, because we lack of needed information to construct the officious relational and power structures within those initiatives. Moreover, since e-democracy shifts political power from institutionalized decisional centers to informal relational network levels, participative democracy initiatives transfers the transparency problem from governments to more foggy layers for investigation, namely informal relational networks: this is for example true if we consider the fact that Terzo Veneto gives the possibility to Unions and Professional Category Representatives to propose drafting of laws, who within those Unions and Category Representatives decide what to write, and, are those organizations democratic or at least participative in the formulation of their proposals? When looking to professional roles of the promoters, members and sustainers of those initiatives, like for many other e-democracy projects, it appears clear that physical and emotive proximity, cultural similarity, professional likeness and pre-existing pools of trust are critical to better understand the social processes of engagement that will redefine governance (Coe A. and all., 2001).

Thus, if for public opinion e-democracy refers to the direct integration of citizens online deliberations to inform the behavior of elected representatives in a non binding way. Designed to enhance, not supplant the traditional representative institutions of a liberal democracy (Chadwick A., 2003), it is clear that the involvement of the third sector in public decision making will be much broader and politically decisive in future. Nowadays, within public organizations, there is a hidden fight for the control of information contained inside computers, that often determine which organizational factions will gain or lose power relative to others. (Moreover) computing infrastructure is expensive, and therefore those who control it govern a large investment of the organizational resources. Finally, many people perceive those who are engaged in computing to be sophisticated and professional; hence, computing brings some extra effective From: Crosby B. C. (2010) power to those who own it (Peled, 2001), this professional power can be used to design and influence participative public decision making systems for the interests of the professionals categories that gain significance through the control of those systems; computing engineers are probably the less hazardous professional category, that could or would wont to benefit from the control of participated governance instruments.

Example of network involved in a participated public problem solving

Well-established bureaucratic politics perspective conceives large organizations (and networks) as consisting of a range of competing individuals, interests, and constituencies, each seeking to control power resources to further their own ends. In this perspective, as government becomes informatized, control over how information may be managed and manipulated becomes increasingly central to power struggles. It may be objected that the politics of convenience have nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, electronic or otherwise; that choice should not be confused with voice. It may depend in large part on the extent to which one is convinced by broader postindustrial arguments about the proliferation of nontraditional repertoires of political activity and whether they can be stretched in this way. But these problems aside, it does seem perverse to ignore one of the central claims of edemocracy itself: a very old but important argument about scale in a democratic polity. Edemocracy renders political participation and influencing the delivery of public services more convenient by shrinking time and distance, enabling large numbers of stakeholders to deliberate and feedback opinion almost simultaneously. Aligning this value with a new approach to the production and the consumption of public services extends the principle. One could stop there with a classic new public management statement about the benefits of quasimarkets for enhancing citizens choice (Chadwick A., 2003). The concept of coproduction (and choice) is not only relevant to the service delivery phase of services management but also can extend across the full value chain of service planning, design, commissioning, managing, delivering, monitoring, and evaluation activities. (Bovair T., 2007) could we also extend this

concept of coproduction to participative decision making process through social networks? And which are the threats of such a development? A large area of e-democracy networking vulnerability revolves around what is known as social engineering. At its most basic level, social engineering involves exploiting the human element of trust, which is at the very core of social networking, thus even the simplest menace of social engineering can irremediably weaken the ties between community members that wish to participate to e-democracy. As a result, identity transparency and certainty plays an important role in social interactions by enabling collective sanctions that safeguard interactions, define and reinforce the parameters of acceptable behavior by demonstrating the consequences of violating norms and values. However, individuals often choose not to enforce social norms because of the (social capital) costs involved with sanctioning. If supported by metanorms, collective sanctions are more effectively reinforced. A metanorm is a norm for punishing those who do not punish deviants. (Jones C. e all., 1997) To efficiently work a participated decision making quasi-market should consequently have identity transparency, and a set of behavior norms and metanorms to guide individuals actions towards collective public interest and community trust building. To maintain a certain level of embeddedness, this kind of network must not get too large, in fact as we can see from our case studies participative local networks rarely exceed two hundred members on their ISN platforms. But can an initiative which involves several hundred members, within a community of several tens of thousands citizens, be considered democratic? Certainly not, but it will certainly be participated. Moreover, are people prepared to publicly establish or at least convey their political, social and civil identity within their communities through participation?

CASE STUDY: DISCUSSION ABOUT E-DEMOCRACY ON FACEBOOK

While searching for public administrations profiles on the most spoken social networks (Facebook, Twitter Youtube, My Space), we found out that despite the number of pages for informative/promotional purposes, in Italy, only few public institutions used the existing social networks has instrument to build a double-side interaction with citizens, and even fewer proposed a non-tokenistic way of participating to the administrative decision making activity. Here is some data based on our researches on the Italian Regional Governments: Subscription to newsletter or RSS Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes 19 official official official official official page page page page page link link to link to link to link to to e-gov. e-dem. Facebook Youtube Twitter platform Platform page channel microblog Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Yes 15 No No No No Yes Yes No No No No No No Yes No No No No No No Yes 4 No No No No Yes No No No No No No Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No 4 No Yes No No Yes No No No No No No Yes No No No No No No No Yes 4 No No No No Yes No No No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes No No No Yes 5 official page link to My Space page No No No No Yes No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No 1

Region Abruzzo Basilicata Calabria Campania Emilia-Romagna Friuli-Venezia Giulia Lazio Liguria Lombardia Marche Molise Piemonte Puglia Sardegna Sicilia Toscana Trentino-Alto Adige Umbria Valle d'Aosta Veneto Total Yes:

As we can see from the table above, the ISN that is most commonly used by Italian Regional Institutions to interact with Stakeholders is Youtube (through Channels), followed by Facebook (through Profiles) and Twitter (through Micro-blogging). Generally Regions that are considered culturally e-democracy inclined, like Emilia Romagna and Piemonte, use several ISN platforms at the same time, smaller regions like Molise and Valle dAosta often dont even try to develop e-democracy and e-government through ISN . Since, at the present time, Facebook with more than three million page subscribers in Italy is for dimensions and social appeal the most important ISN for the Italian internet community,

we have chosen it, to build our e-democracy debate through an ISN. This is how we designed and developed the project: 1. To start, we have chosen a name and designed a logo that could attract the attention of Italian Facebook users, here they are: Cittadini Italiani: Governiamoci con I Social Network

2. We have then wrote a statute, with the aims of the project and the means to participate (link to the chart) the content of the statute was organized has follows: a. The first part should describe why (in Italy) representative democracy is not sufficient to achieve a social optimum and satisfy the needs of Italian citizens; b. The second part should tell what is our aim, why do we think that participative democracy can be the solution to Italian Governability and Governance problems; c. The third part should explain why we need the support of other citizens to make true our project and how and why should they help us;

d. The fourth and last part of the statute, should explain how to realize this initiative on other ISNs, and thus, explained which could be the strategy used to convince public institutions to sustain and participate to the project, by building a ISN profile, and using it for e-democracy purposes;

3. We have posted some questions to understand the commitment of citizens towards edemocracy, and realize if they wanted to participate to this initiative on Facebook, then we invited all friends to answer. Unfortunately, even if more than two hundred persons were invited to answer those questions, on average only one out of ten did it, at least until today (24/12/2011). Here are the most answered questions with the results of the surveys:

Anwers to the question: If pubblic institutions would seriusly take into account your opinions would you participate to this e-democracy initiative through Facebook?
0 14,3% 14,3% 71,4% 0,0% 20,0% 40,0% 60,0% 80,0% I dont know No Not through facebook Yes

Anwers to the question: A good citizen should proactively participate to administrative and political initiatives within his community?
No 0% 56,25% 44% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Yes, when he has spare time Yes, in a diligent way

Lets try to comment those answers: As we can see from the first question the majority of the ones who answered to the question are apparently interested to an e-democracy initiative on Facebook, clearly the condition of being seriously taken into account in final decision making by public Institutions was critical for the determination of this result. One of the persons who answered that he would not participate to it if done on Facebook, told us, through a post, that according to him: Participative e-democracy initiatives should be done only through physical, face to face discussion in squares, universities or on newspapers, and that social network policy making was the (d)evil of civil society, because people when online do things to quickly and badly, preferring to copy others easily accessible ideas instead of developing their own opinion. The second question answer make clear that participation to e-democracy activity is considered a leisure time activity by many persons, and that even the idle (or good) citizen of which we spoke, should participate only when they have free time. Unfortunately none of the citizens that answered those questions was a good citizen or had free time, because none of them participated proactively to this project. A Chinese fellow (a friend) posted a comment telling that he could not participate to this initiative, we could thus ask ourselves if the problem of censorship towards political topics is so problematic in China? Nevertheless, I would say, that despite the alleged Chinese Government censorship, this person participated more than his Italian colleagues that probably auto-censored themselves, and despite calls never activated to comment and sustain the initiative, but they did answer some questions.

4. We have then posted some links to e-democracy platforms, forums and participative citizenry guides to help potential users to become familiar with the e-democracy topic and thus be able to discuss it on our page. This initiative was unsuccessful, probably because links had too many information and looked to complicated and technical to enable quickly people to understand the topic. 5. Since even people who liked (I likers) the initiative, did not post messages, questions, videos or links, we thought that people could feel embarrassed to interact with us because they were recognizable, thus we appointed all I likers as administrators of the page. In this way they could post opinions and ideas on the notice-board, without worrying for what others should think, since the profile used to post things could be the one of the administrators. Despite this attempt nothing changed, apathy (or maybe discretion) continued. 6. Finally we shared on other Facebook users notice-board The Jante Laws: a sort of satirical praise of passivity and indifference of people, that tells us, how with ten laws and one blackmail, a government could psychologically imprison people in a submissive way of existing. This page was also an invitation to people to post their idle values and advices to build a more free, inclusive and participative governance of society. The posted answers, given their content, have not proved to be worthy of being mentioned.

CONCLUSION
Has we have seen through our case study on Facebook: nowadays, the majority of citizens feel the need to give priority to the protection of themselves, from the emergence of their personal political identity and ideas, that is much more personal than the political flag that people are used to wave publicly. Conversely, more entrepreneurial and socially skilled individuals use the possibility of expressing their social, political and civil identity as an asset, that if ably built and established through participative decision making process can become a social capital investment. E-democracy gives to each of us a double opportunity, with two distinct roads: Use this expanded possibility to participate for social and political purposes, to transform us in active sustainers for things in which we truly believe. Use this expanded possibility to participate for social and political purposes to maximize our social capital outcome and gain benefits when retransforming this social capital into resources, information, influence and control when needed.

The exclusion of everyday life, relations, and social approval systems from our understanding of democratic participation is a serious misrecognition of some of the most powerful modes of citizen engagement, which we have tried to illustrate through this paper. We hope that in the future this topic will be studied and treated has a priority for e-democracy related issues.

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Online resources Title (format) <Web-adress>

A SOCNET Discussion on the Origins of the Term Social Capital ( forum) on SOCNET < http://www.analytictech.com/borgatti/socnet_social_capital_discussion.htm>

Via Per Via: La Citt che Partecipa (e-democracy platform) < http://www.comune.modena.it/viapervia>

Agenda del Veneto Digitale (ISN) on Ning < http://agendavenetodigitale.ning.com/>

Carta dei Diritti Digitali (ISN) on IdeaScale <http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-dei-diritti-digitali/70129-16347>

Carta della partecipazione digitale Wiki (ISN) on Wikia and IdeaScala <http://it.democraziadigitale.wikia.com/wiki/Carta_della_partecipazione_digitale_Wiki:Portale_comunit> <http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-della-partcipazione-digitale/7391116347>

Terzo Veneto (e-democracy platform) <http://www.terzoveneto.it/index.php?id=1>

Cittadini Italian: Governiamoci con I Social Network (ISN) on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-SocialNetwork/247632068633529 >

Etucosacivedi San Giobbe (ISN) on Facebook and Twitter <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744> <http://twitter.com/etucosacivedi >

Il consiglio dei ragazzi (ISN) on Ning <http://ilconsigliodeiragazzi.ning.com/ >

Come si realizza la Democrazia Partecipativa in Rete (article) <http://giornalaio.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/come-si-realizza-la-democrazia-partecipativain-rete/>

Democrazia partecipativa: l'Islanda, Facebook e la Carta Costituzionale (article) <http://www.corsi-web.com/corso_online/democrazia_partecipativa.html>