the Web tools have been used as a means of dissemination and mobile as a means of voting and counting to hold the first International Digital Direct Election - ID2E. This article aims to describe the ID2E performed in order to test the viability for the international voting by mobiles using SMS protocol, using Web 2.0 tools to facilitate discussions about the election main theme.
1. IADIS International Conference e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice 2010
INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL DIRECT ELECTION: AN
APPROACH ABOUT COLLABORATION BETWEEN WEB
TOOLS AND MOBILE
Waldoir Valentim Gomes Junior1; Ângela Iara Zotti1,2; Claudia de Oliveira Bueno1,2; Renato
Jorge Prim1 and Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, PhD1,2
1
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Campus Universitário, Trindade, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil.
2
Instituto de Governo Eletrônico, Inteligência e Sistemas – i3G. Rua Lauro Linhares, 728 sl. 105. Trindade,
Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil.
ABSTRACT
The intense participation of a population to support decisions through participatory democratic process is hampered by a
number of issues such as remote location, infrastructure, availability of time and political organization among the
communities. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has emerged as an alternative solution to this
problem. ICT associated with the power of the Internet represent true gear joint operational processes of governments and
nongovernmental entities providing flow of information, services and popular participation. On the one hand the Internet
has democratized access to information for people the mobile has democratized communication. In this sense, the Web
tools have been used as a means of dissemination and mobile as a means of voting and counting to hold the first
International Digital Direct Election - ID2E. This article aims to describe the ID2E performed in order to test the viability
for the international voting by mobiles using SMS protocol, using Web 2.0 tools to facilitate discussions about the
election main theme.
KEYWORDS
Information and communication technologies, digital election, e-democracy, WEB collaborative tools, mobile.
1. INTRODUCTION
Many initiatives have been proposed to participatory democratic processes refer to the Web environment,
making it possible popular participation in the discussion of matters of any kind, giving everyone the power
to opinion and decision.
As a result, a number of tools and web applications are available to assist and expand the e-democracy.
On the one hand the Internet has democratized access to information for people mobile has democratized the
communication. On the Internet, access to a wealth of information is available for a relatively short time to
any User of the system. In the same vein the mobile phone has been providing not only mobility, but rather a
real ability to interact with various technologies that allow leaving literally "the world in our hands."
A few years ago mobile phones, have spread rapidly in most developed countries, however, presents
significant growth in developing or poor countries. Currently there are around 4.1 billion mobile phones, with
China on top in numbers of aircraft in the world, followed by India, the United States and Russia.
The mobile phone features a number of bundled services, especially SMS (Short Message Service) is a
standardized communication service, using a communication protocol that allows you exchange short text
messages between mobile handset. The SMS service basically uses 5 protocols, and the employee is the
SMPP (Short Message Peer to Peer), the main power could easily send messages between different carriers, it
supports a greater number portability.
The "torpedo", the popular name of SMS, soon took the lead of mobile applications and was the great
propagator of data usage on mobile phones.
In Brazil, the Research “ICT households and Users 2008” of Brazil Internet Steering Committee (CGI),
found that about 56% of respondents have a mobile phone, of which 41% have Internet access. That survey
67
3. IADIS International Conference e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice 2010
most important thing is to realize that innovation within the network will necessarily involve an intensive use
of collaborative tools, though.
3. INTERNATIONAL DIRECT DIGITAL ELECTION PROCESS
The experience was executed by the Information Society Studies Group – GESI/2009, linked to the
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC, and the e-Gov, Intelligence and Systems Institute – i3G,
both installed inside the city of Florianopolis – Santa Catarina – Brazil. The first ED2I was realized between
6 and 20 of November, in the year of 2009.
The tally of votes was done inside an application working on Dot Net platform, inside a server cell phone.
The experimentation had two objectives: evaluate an e-Voting method and the use of mobile devices as tools
for public decision taking; and evaluate the use of Web 2.0 environment for organization and conduction of
public discussions about these decisions.
The theme for discussion and voting was: “Is the United Nations accomplishing its mission?” To vote the
person should send a text message (SMS) with three characters for the phone number +55 48 88340682
(international) or 48 88340682 (Brazil), according to the instructions: If you want to vote YES the message
must contain the characters: 001, if the option is NOT the message must contain the characters: 002.
Any cell phone, regardless of carrier, from anywhere in the world could vote. There was no need to be a
PDA, SmartPhone or similar. Intent on making an international election, polling anywhere in the world, was
just to test the communication protocol for sending SMS through cell phones.
About security, as scientific seminar held during the votting process, using the technique of IBB (Multiple
Identical Ballot-Box) added by encrypting the votes, reaches higher security level with the existing protocols
in current electronic voting (Alefragis et all, 2004).
About the solution on sharing information inside Web 2.0 environments, about the voted theme, there was
selected the following pages: Delicious to publish links related to the experiment; iPetitions, to advice people
to the voting process; Twitter, and Blogger to the public post comments favorable or opposite to United
Nations; GMail, and Metajur Discussion List to privately post comments; Wikipedia, ScribD, and Slideshare
to publish reports or presentations resulting from the discussions about the theme; Skoob to share books
which maybe can give some historical base to the voting process, and help on argumentation about the
United Nations; Picasa, Flickr, and Panoramio to post pictures (with geographic position for the two last
pages) referred to votes assumed by the voters; You Tube to post vídeos related to the voters, assuming its
votes; Orkut, and FaceBook for the possible formation of social networks about the specified theme; and
Second Life to simulate the voting process inside virtual environments. In this paper, only the results of some
tools are going to be detailed. The tools access will be available on the references at the end of the article.
Before and during the election period, information regarding the election was released in these tools, such
as the convocatories in multiple languages, the arguments pro and con, which emphasized the theme
proposed for election as well as pictures of group meetings organizers.
Two groups were formed with the intention to raise arguments for the YES and the other for NO, and
disseminate them in the chosen Web 2.0 tools.
4. RESULTS
The cell phone used as a digital ballot box worked normally during the voting period, accumulating its basic
functions to send and receive voice calls, without any problem. The result was communicated immediately
after the final time, on 2009, November 20, at 17:00h GMT.
The result achieved was that 53.097% of the voters voted "NO" and 46.682% voted "yes". So, according
to ED2I result, the UN is not fulfilling its mission, as shown in Table 1.
69
5. IADIS International Conference e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice 2010
transmit information. On the other hand the phone will be improved in order to identify the User and give
him/her the right to vote.
Security procedures using biometrics should and can be better explored in the User ID voting. The
biometric identification technologies are already highly sedimented varying only the applications depending
on the level of security. The challenging character would be to put this technology in a cell phone, and from
its technological attributes identifying the iris, retina, voice, fingerprint and others.
Web 2.0 was the protagonist of the disclosure of this election, using the tools of communication. They
own a good power of penetration to interact in order to convince people to participate. By themselves the
tools do not motivate people to vote, but it can be one way of motivating people to participate.
During the process, it was realized that some people did not know how to send an SMS. So, the lesson is
that when something involves technology a brief tutorial must be presented.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank i3G Institute for part of the financial support for this document and GESI/2009 by the
effort in performing the ED2I process.
REFERENCES
Alefragis, P.S. et all, 2004. An electronic voting scheme with physical multiple administrators and identical ballot boxes,
ICWI 2004: Madrid, Spain. pp. 99-106.
Bentivegna, S., 2000. Hablar de Política En La Red: Los Newgroups Políticos. Cuadernos De Información Y
Comunicación – Ciberdemocracia , Madrid, ES.
Boyd, Ovid Pacific, 2007. What Are the Future Possibilities of eDemocracy? A Discussion Paper. Springer-Verlag,
Berlin Heidelberg.
Castells, M., 2002. A sociedade em Rede. Paz e Terra, São Paulo, BR.
Davis, R., 2000. Tecnologias de la comunicación y democracia: El factor Internet. Cuadernos de Información y
Comunicación – Ciberdemocracia, Madrid, Universidad Complutense.
Friedman, T. L., 2007. O mundo é plano: um breve histórico do século XXI. Objetiva, Rio de janeiro, BR.
Garcia, T. H. B. et all, 2003. A democracia na era do governo eletrônico. In: II Simposio Internacional de Propriedade
Intelectual, Informação e Ética. In: II Simposio Internacional de Propriedade Intelectual, Informação e Ética-
Ciberética 2003, Anais do II Ciberética, 2003. v. 1. p. 1-16.
Lytras, M. D. Dimiani, E. Pablos, P. O., 2009. Web 2.0: The Bussines Modell. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Mazzoleni, G., 2000. La Revolución Simbólica de Internet. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación –
Ciberdemocracia, Madrid, Universidad Complutense.
Petrauskas, R., 2006. Los princípios y la implementación de la democracia electrónica. In: Derechos y Tecnología: Las
actividades de los poderes públicos, Thomson Civitas, Universidad de Zaragoza (Espanha), pp 85-113.
Ramos Júnior, H. S. et all, 2007. Democracia Eletrônica como um Sistema Teleológico e Emergente. In: Teoria Geral de
Sistemas: Uma abordagem multidisciplinar do conhecimento, Florianópolis: EGC, 2007. PP.36-44.
Some Web tools adresses for ED2I:
http://delicious.com/ Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.ipetitions.com/ Accessed in November, 2010
http://siweb20.blogspot.com/start Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.scribd.com/siweb20Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.slideshare.net/ Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.flickr.com/ Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.panoramio.com/ Accessed in November, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/ Accessed in November, 2009
71