[DW] E-Mayor of Moreland Australia

[Steven Clift]

*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do ***


While in Canberra, Australia a number of delegates to a local
government conference stopped by my mini-presentation at the National
Press Club.  I was honoured to be invited along to dinner and met
folks from a number of cities.  They all has a number of e-democracy
stories and interest.  Competition among different levels of
government will be one of the biggest drivers of e-democracy
investment in government.  If they can do it, so can we.

I asked the mayor of Moreland to send in 400 words for DO-WIRE on his
experience using the Internet as a Weo (Wired elected official).

Steven Clift
Democracies Online Newswire

P.S. If you spot other Weos in the wild, be sure to file a report:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:              Tue, 08 Jan 2002 16:08:51 +1100
From:                   "Robert Larocca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:                     <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                My 400 words on e-democracy in the City of Moreland

- clip -
____________________________

An e-mayor start-up

One of the things that I have been doing as both a Councillor and now
Mayor of the City of Moreland (http://www.moreland.vic.gov.au) is to
promote the on-line environment as a place for an elected official to
'do business' in the same way as a street corner or Council chamber.

Moreland already has a quite vibrant e-culture, Virtual Moreland (
http://www.vmore.org.au) is one example.

The dream has been to create, using the Moreland City Council web-
page, a portal to the Moreland Community so that you can interact
with people, groups, government and business on-line. Significant
steps have been made, but there is a long way to go. The area that
needs the greatest work in my view is the culture of the citizens as
opposed to the technology.

So how have I done that and what happened?

Ward meetings

Like most elected officials I hold regular meetings with my
constituents and most of these meetings are your standard face to
face meeting, but over the last two years I have run 'on-line ward
meetings' which have been nothing more than an open chat room and me.

I have never had more than 4 participants and put this down to lack
of people knowing that it is on! After all the main promotion of it
was in the newspaper and on the Council's web page!

Youth forum

This was the most successful on-line venture that I did. The Council
held a 2-day youth summit and I held one of the workshops on-line,
inviting local schools to log in. We had about 30 participants and it
was quite a blast! This was not a surprise as the participants were
all web savvy. What this showed was that for the format to work you
need a receptive audience.

Chat with the Mayor

Building on the ward meetings, I have also held 'Chat with the Mayor'
on-line and despite inviting the 1200 odd community groups with email
and the normal advertising it was less successful than the ward
meetings! There must be a better way.

On-line question time

My Council runs a half-hour question time where any citizen can ask
any question, without notice, to the Council at its meeting. This is
a live format only and I expanded it to give people the opportunity
to ask a question via the Council chat room, in real time.

That meant that on the night I have to choose between on-line and
physical questions from citizens. It also suffered from a lack of
participation and the use of the wrong format - but we believe that
it is worth pursuing. Imagine, it could grow to our Parliamentarians
answering questions of their constituents while they are in the
chamber. In Australia some of our Federal politicians are already
hooked up in the chamber.

The next step

I thought all my Christmases had come at once when I met Steven Clift
and he explained to me the operation of the Minnesota list.

Using an example he provided about a Mayor with a weekly newsletter I
am going to give that a go.

Robert Larocca
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Cr Robert Larocca
Mayor, City of Moreland


------- End of forwarded message -------

^               ^               ^                ^
Steven L. Clift    -    W: http://www.publicus.net
Minneapolis    -   -   -     E: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Minnesota  -   -   -   -   -    T: +1.612.822.8667
USA    -   -   -   -   -   -   -     ICQ: 13789183


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