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A blog about Governance and Development for All

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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

democracy

e-democracies: will Digg-like social networks pave the way for participatory decision-making?

The hype about social networking sites doesn't seem to come to an end.  If it's not Facebook, it's MySpace, and now it's Twitter.  Even though some people are still reluctant to believe in the functionality of some of these web 2.0 applications, it's a matter of years before they become a tool that we have to use on a daily basis, as it happened with email and the internet not so many years ago. 

In this entry, I will follow-up on one of Tanya's three points mentioned in her last entry -namely, participation-, and will make the case for Digg, one of some applications for social bookmarking that allow its users to share, comment and vote on their preferred bookmarks.  From my perspective, these participatory features can give us a glimpse of how decision making processes in the public sector might look like in the not-very-remote future.

From m-euphoria to m-governance, thinking about the potential of mobile technology

The hype about mobile technology for development work is going on the rise.  It's not for granted.  More than four billion worldwide mobile subscriptions -with the fastest growth trend in developing countries-, sounds like a great opportunity to reach and interact with broader groups of people, including the poor.  Actually, mobile penetration in Africa has expanded from about 2 to 28 subscribers (per 100 inhabitants) since 2000 (see graph at the bottom). 

This looks like a great scenario, but putting aside the m-euphoria let's explore the role for mobile technology in the field of governance.