E-Democracy.Org is a non-profit, non-partisan, citizen-based project for improving citizen participation in democracies and communities through the power of information and communication technologies and strategies. Our digital communities include people of all political persuasions who debate together, and often translate their discussions into community action at the state and local levels.

E-Democracy.Org was established as Minnesota E-Democracy in 1994 when politically-oriented Internet-savvy activists and community networking volunteers created the United States’ first election-oriented website. The creation of Minnesota E-Democracy was conceptualized by Steven Clift and leveraged the resources of several community network and non-profit Internet organizations including Twin Cities Free-Net, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network Internet service and Minnesota Regional Network (MRNet) as well as the League of Women Voters.

Starting with the statewide forum of MN-Politics and through the development of community forums in Minnesota and elsewhere, E-Democracy.Org has experience of encouraging citizens, politicians, elected officials and media folks to interact in an electronic commons. While these forums suffer from the same signal to noise limitations of other types of Internet dialog, their rules-based structure encourages thoughtful debate, and occasionally issues brought up in forums reach the general community. Coalitions are formed, politicians use the forums as an organizing tool for their campaigns and elected officials use the forums as mechanisms for acquiring feedback.

In 2003 E-Democracy.Org began the process of chartering local organizations to develop their own structures around the E-Democracy toolsets and guidelines using service organizations such as Rotary Club or Kiwanis International as models. Currently E-Democracy.Org is replicating its model for local forums in the United Kingdom, providing tools, documentation (http://e-democracy.org/uk/guide.pdf) and mentorship to forums there.

The core team implementing the project is a group of about 20 volunteers under the guidance of a board of directors. The key volunteers are the forum discussion moderators and people who maintain the web pages. The board arbitrates disputes between forum moderators and forum members. There are also several volunteers who concern themselves with improving the technology. There are approximately 3000 members of our forums in total. However, many people belong to more than one so the number of different people is lower. Anyone willing to accept the rules of participation is welcome to join our forums.

E-Democracy.Org uses standard e-mail, World Wide Web and database technologies. While we have interest in the development of special tools in areas where we see an elegance in some sort of computer enhancement related to our mission, E-Democracy.Org relies on a toolset commonly available to any community of interest. However, at its core, E-Democracy.Org is an implementation of technology to empower political digital communities rather than a technological system itself. However, E-Democracy.Org is currently working with Groupserver’s suite of open source tools to provide technology tools for the UK forums (see: http://e-democracy.org/groupserver).