1. Problems and motivations
The Enquete Commission "Internet and digital society" is a supra-group working group set up by the German Bundestag to develop recommendations for action in order to prepare decisions in the German Bundestag on extensive and important subject matters. So far there have been 22 inquiry commissions in the German Bundestag. The 23rd Enquete Commission dealt with the topic of "Internet and digitization" for an election period and also tried out an experiment that had not yet been dared. Within the Commission's working groups, citizens had the opportunity to participate in the discussions and to make their own suggestions via the Internet. This was intended to increase political participation and create more transparency for parliamentary processes. The commission was divided into twelve project groups, which deal specifically with individual aspects of the topic "Internet and digital society". This included media literacy, copyright, net neutrality, data protection and personal rights, education and research, access, structure and security on the net, democracy and state, culture, media and the public, consumer protection, economy, work and green IT, interoperability, standards, free software, and finally international and internet governance.
2. History
The Study Commission began its work for the Bundestag on March 4, 2010 and held its final debate on April 18, 2013. In the meantime, inventories and recommendations for action were drawn up in 14 reports, and there were 20 complete inquiries and 179 meetings in the individual project groups over the three years. The public was particularly involved in the work processes and the discussions and decision-making. Citizens' participation was also officially noted by an appointment decision, and interested parties were able to get information and participate through public meetings, hearings with livestream and via the reporting on the website. The website of the German Bundestag provided daily updates on the current discussions and results of the Enquete Commission. Initially, the go-live in the individual project groups met with resistance from the members of the inquiry commission, as some members did not want to miss the opportunity to express opinions and thoughts freely and thoughtlessly without having to justify themselves in public. The decision about the live broadcast was therefore left to the individual project groups themselves. In contrast to traditional inquiry commissions, the commission not only published an interim report and a final report, but also twelve very detailed interim reports of the individual project groups, which contained an inventory and a recommendation for action to the German Bundestag. In addition to the reports, each project group prepared regular reports and papers on their discussions and results, which were then available on the website. On 24 February 2011, in addition to the Commission's website, an online platform for citizen participation, a Twitter account and a member blog were also set up. The online platform, in particular, was intended to provide citizens with a way to participate directly in the inquiry commission. Due to the delayed launch of the online platform, the citizens could not participate in the project groups from the start.
3. Initiating body and funding
The Study Commission was founded by the Federal Government and is also financed by it. In the meantime, the federal government refused to provide further funding or significantly restricted the financial framework. It was only through the non-profit association Liquid Democracy that the online platform for the inquiry commission was set up in 2011. In some cases, up to 16 volunteers worked on the launch of the website.
4. Participant selection
The inquiry consisted of 34 members, of which 17 members were members of the Bundestag and 17 external experts. The membership structure was very heterogeneous. 19 different professional groups were represented among the members and there was an average age of 45 years. In addition, it was possible for the first time that citizens could also take part in the work of the Study Commission. On the one hand, they were able to register on the online platform under a user name and actively participate in discussions there. Registration was done by providing some personal information and registering with a valid email address. Unfortunately, it is not known exactly what information the user had to disclose. In addition to a general registration, you could also register specifically for individual project groups that corresponded to your own interest. Each user was shown the current news from the project group on his homepage. The users could either remain anonymous with their user name or create a detailed user profile. How many users complied with this is unfortunately not known. All reports, working papers and documents that were drawn up in the project groups could be viewed by the users on the internet platform. In addition, the citizens were able to comment on the documents and make changes to them. This was also possible with comments from other users. An arrow system also gave the opportunity to rate a contribution.
5. Consideration, decisions and dealing with the public
The working method within the inquiry commission was carried out uniformly in all project groups. Meetings were held within the project groups every Monday. The nine to fifteen group members worked together on a text that contained the consensus decision on a matter and was discussed again in a meeting of the overall inquiry and then passed with a recommendation to the German Bundestag. One goal within the way of working was to reach a consensus. If there was no agreement on a question or topic, the principle of freezing was decided. The discussion within the project group was frozen at the current status and released for voting on a fixed date without first having the prospect of an agreement. The aim was to end deadlocked discussions and to limit the work on individual questions. Some processes were not always comprehensible for external users or participants of the online platform, which often caused confusion among users. The overall aim of the Study Commission was to integrate the citizens into the political decision-making process and to add value for their parliamentary work from their expertise. In addition, a dialogue between politicians and citizens should emerge with the help of online participation.
6. Influence, results and effects
Unfortunately, the Commission's online platform did not achieve the desired response. In the first week after the launch, 1000 users registered on the platform. This was seen as a good start and gave hope for further growth. Unfortunately, this was not the case until the end of the inquiry commission. Ultimately, there were a total of 3,250 registrations on the platform. 80,000 actions were carried out, including ratings, comments and contributions. During the entire period, 30,000 people visited the website.
The suggestions of the users were dealt with very differently within the project groups. On the one hand, there were word-for-word transfers of the recommendations for action, but this only happened twice. In both cases, the proposal did not come from a single person, but in the first case from the Institute for Media Education in Research and Practice and in the second case from the Computer Games and Education Group. In the project groups Education and Research and Democracy and the State, the content of two proposals from online users has been incorporated into the official recommendation for action by the Commission. The third form of using external proposals was to document the proposals. Furthermore, some suggestions were included in the special votes and others were announced on other platforms, but were not included in the reports of the Commission.
7. Analysis and criticism
The quality of online participation was high, but not the quantity of users and participants. The few users made high-quality suggestions, but only two of them have been included verbatim in the Commission's report. Unfortunately, it is not known whether this was taken into account in political decision-making within the Bundestag. Unfortunately, transparency ends where the Study Commission has ended its work. Unfortunately, it can be seen from the comments of the participants and members of the commission that the workload between the commission and the online platform was very underestimated and that the small project groups had to cope with a very high workload due to the large amount of information. In addition, many complained about the lack of support from the federal government. The integration of the commission work and the online platform was unsuccessful and presented the employees with great challenges. As a successful result, however, it can be stated that there has been a permanent digital committee in the Bundestag since the end of the inquiry commission, which continues to deal with questions and topics of the Internet. The implementation of transparency in the individual decisions and discussions was a good approach, but it was not as well received in society as previously expected.
8. Source
German Bundestag, 2013. Final report of the study commission "Internet and digital society". Bundestag printed paper 17/12550: http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/125/1712550.pdf
9. External links