"Open" is not just a fancy synonym for transparent and accountable. The "Open" in Open Government, Open Data, Open Information, and Open Innovation stands for the changing relation between citizens and authorities. Many citizens no longer accept the passive stance representative democracy held for them. They take an active approach in setting up better means of collaboration by ICTs. They demand and gain access to their historically grown collective knowledge stored in government data. Not just on a local level, they actively shape the political agenda. Open Government is to be seen in the context of citizens‘ rights: the right to actively participate in the process of agenda-setting and decision-making. Research into open government needs to address the value of the changing relation between citizens, public administration, and political authority. The paper argues finally for the application of the Public Value concept to research into open government.

The understanding of participation as a political matter has changed back and forth over the years. The latest twist back to appreciative attributions towards participation is fuelled by the development of the Internet, and especially the Social Web. Citizen participation is unanimously seen as an essential precondition for Deliberative-Collaborative eDemocracy (Petrik, 2010) enabled by Web 2.0. This paper considers participatory culture and its specific political, cultural, societal, and educational characteristics as a prerequisite for e-participation and argues that social media literacy is indispensable for e-participation to be sustainable. Young people’s affinity spaces (Jenkins, et.al., 2006) can only lay down the foundations for social media literacy, but their further development depends on education. Political Education would be well advised to adapt innovative pedagogical approaches to the acquirement of new media literacy. This paper introduces an exemplary educational tool – predominately but not exclusively for political/civic education – namely the website PoliPedia.at. Teachers can use it to deliberately create a balanced space for collaboration between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. PoliPedia – as a participative online tool – has the potential to facilitate participation experience in political/civic education and supports social media education. Thereby the embedding of technology in pedagogical and societal conceptualizations is crucial.

This paper aims to make a contribution toward an improvement of European e-policy practice. It is inspired by the conviction that successful e-policy strategies can lead to balanced chances for all members in certain societies to aquire the absolutely indispensable capabilities for decision-making in the context of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Following the path of the development of e-policy papers it has to be stated that many goals have not yet been achieved. The techno-deterministic concepts 'access' and 'usage' seem not to reach far enough to get people really involved and informed. Many more aspects have to be considered in order to create a climate for innovation where different choices made by different individuals according to their different social, economic or cultural backgrounds do not lead automatically to the well known either or not, connected or not-connected, haves or have-nots, but to a variety of patterns of involvement. In this paper, we argue for different e-policy strategies according to cultural aspects in certain societies.And hereby we will focus on the cultural aspects of information itself, on the notion of information in different information cultures. It also seems important to mention at this stage that we believe that getting all members of society involved in the ICT-innovation process in order to provide the basis for informed decisions by each individual member is the most important task of e-policy. 1)

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