E-Democracy - Science topic

I think that there at least two relevant questions intertwined in your query:

1) What is the role of the Right to Information?

2) What is the role of e-democracy and how does that role relate to that of the Right to Information.

There are no one "right" answer to either of these two questions. As in any situation concerning human endeavors, what is done in practice is never exactly like the theories that are supposedly being followed, nor is there any one theory of human behaviour or rights that is universally accepted or locked in time forever more.

All that being said, I can offer my vision of both issues.

The Right to Information, from my point of view, has at it's base two major purposes: the first, giving the citizens of a given country access to the information that they need to supervise the use of power of their government. Without direct access to vital information the citizenry (and civil society organizations) cannot possiibly hope to be able to understand what decisions are being made by their government, much less be in a position to criticize or even support those decisions in an intelligent and knowledgableable manner. The second, and much more important purpose (in my opinion), is to give the citizens the information they need to be able to participate actively in policy making in general and decision making in particular. It is a well known fact that controlling any situation is much easier if you start at the planning stage as opposed to trying to change the direction of an on-going project/operation. As such, citizen participation is vitally necessary if the populace is to have any real control of the way that they are to be governed. Citizenry without a knowledge of the issues behind various questions of policy and decision making cannot possibly be part of those processes (or if they are, the result of their participation will always be a matter emotion and will be open to manipulation of those who have access to information that they can use selectively to persaude the populace in their direction).

E-democracy can either be treated as a technical application for the betterment of the performance of democratic institutions that existed before the Internet and fast electronic media, or it can be treated as a new conception of democracy in the direction of realizing something closer to direct democracy on a national (and perhaps even international) scale. From everything that I have seen and read, in most cases the first option is the one that is being pursued. I have yet to hear of any real effort of any government to find ways to allow the populace to decide on anything other than extremely local issues on new scales that didn't exist before e-democracy (public referendums have existed almost since the beginning of western democracy, so they cannot be included in a list of new democratic procedures that are a result of e-democracy). In any case, which ever of the two possibilities that I mentioned above are pursued, the role of the Right to Information will be one of the two roles that I wrote about here.

One of the problems that are liable to exist because of the existence of the Internet and fast communication is the MISUSE of "information". If in the past it was difficult to get propogranda or misleading and skewed information to the eyes and ears of the entire populace within seconds, that is no longer the case. We are continually being bombarded by various sources of information that have their own specific intentions (that are generally unknown to the public) that can, and do (in many cases) pass on only the real information that serves their purposes or pass on misinformation, for those same purposes. Once they have managed to get their version of reality to go viral, it will take an enormous effort to undo / contradict that vision of reality.

I don't know if you can consider this rather long text as an answer to your question, but I hope that I have managed to pass on some of the underlying questions that I think have to be answered before it is possible to give any kind of difinitive answer to your query.

I'm afraid I can't help save to say that most 'cost benefit' analyses here in the UK, do results in saved costs to the government, but almost invariably do not result in any consumer or customer benefits. The cost reductions results in organizational benefits. However, the whole process tends to be presented as being of benefit to customers and consumers, and the end result is usually disbelief and incredulity.

I feel evoting is a good idea. but citizens have little trust in machines. I am a leader programmer on the evoting platform at IUIU but  we need to tackle more of people's thoughts to believe in the system.

Prof. Ewa Ziemba  , thank you very much for this paper.

The following article might be of help:

Fábio Marques, Gonçalo Paiva Dias, André Zúquete, “Security Concerns in eGovernment Agent-Based Interoperability”. Electronic Government, Procedings of Ongoing Research, General Development Issues and Projects of EGOV 09, 8th International Conference, Linz, Austria, August 30 to September 3, pp. 197-204.

available in:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228900337_Security_concerns_in_eGovernment_agent-based_interoperability

You can even explore idea with Citizen Relationship Management Framework

Downvoting, especially anonymous is very bad for social network like ResearchGate ! As mentioned before, there are many downvotes for the reason of "punishment", as @András mentioned.@Miranda is aware of some examples of continuous downvoting of some posts, as I am! @Carlos, yes, if down-voted then explanation with good arguments should be provided. It is possible to realize/change this approach by slightly modification in RG software. When you want to downvote something, fill the explanation window before and than downvoting is possible! The main issue here is anonymity of downvoter!

Dear Professor Hackett, let me thank you for your intriguing question. From my point of view it covers three sub-domains.

1) Direct / Instant Democracy. Some political activists, I can cite as examples Beppe Grillo or Pippo Civati in Italy, let their supporters wide room to express themselves and even to fix important decisions over the net. For instance, Civati (Democrat Party), despite his own perplexities, recently decided to appoint Renzi's Government after a web poll. What arises from observation is that decisions still demand time. People have to inform themselves (even on simple, emotional subjects), so the process is not "istant". And, for more complex decisions, it seems reasonable that the cost of being informed (or feel to be) can easily overcome the benefit of direct participation. So, I don't think internet will make democratic systems to shift from representation to direct exercise of decision power.

2) Electronic vote and 3) costs

Beyond the issues raised by Professor Massar (with which I agree), I guess use of technology will allow to adopt more sophisticated voting systems at a reasonable cost. For instance, living in France (roughly 46 millions of voters) I tried to verify if a Single Transferable Vote system might be adopted, under the constraint that a single poll allow the election of both President and Parliament and that MPs represent a constituency each, with gender parity. With an electronic system there is (almost) no problem. The ballot would be similar than an "Euromillions" (european lottery) ticket and the optical machines would be similar (so the transmission network) used for this lottery. Only, if a paper witness of the vote is expected in order to allow ex post control, vote cannot occur from home.