| ANNEX J |
| |
| EXPERT
PANEL ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES:
SUB-GROUP ON DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION: SUMMARY OF
RECOMMENDATIONS |
| 1. The
Scottish Parliament should establish a process to review,
report and make recommendations to improve democratic
participation. |
| |
| 2. The
Scottish Parliament should create a Citizen's Charter
committing all MSPs and officials to best customer care
models of practice. |
| |
| 3. The
Scottish Parliament should take account of the variable
nature of individuals and organisations needing public
information and make appropriate provision. |
| |
| 4. The
Scottish Parliament should develop non-technology based
public information media to cater for the needs of the
information, economic and technology have-nots. |
| |
| 5. The
Scottish Parliament should seek to encourage and engage
young people in schools, colleges and universities in the
work of the Parliament. |
| |
| 6. The
Scottish Parliament should also use similar, though less
formal, initiatives to continually encourage the
population in lifelong learning about the workings of the
Parliament. |
| |
| 7. The
Scottish Parliament should appoint an Education Officer,
with an education background, who should be responsible
for developing for adults and children: |
- interactive CD-ROM
education courses;
- Internet Web-site
education pages;
- content for inclusion
in school, college and university curricula;
- an education visits
programme for the Scottish Parliament campus.
|
| |
| 8. The
Scottish Parliament should establish partnerships with
educational organisations in Scotland, such as the
Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum and the
Scottish Virtual Teachers Centre, to develop educational
materials and ensure their inclusion in curricula. |
| |
| 9. The
Scottish Parliament should ensure background papers,
statistics, etc should be clearly indexed for research
purposes including research by interest groups and should
be easily accessible on the Internet. |
| |
| 10. The
Scottish Parliament should provide a room for research
associated with the Parliament for physical inspection of
documents. |
| |
| 11. The
Scottish Parliament should make educational materials
relating to the Scottish Parliament available in public
libraries and on the Internet to assist with the
education of the adult population. |
| |
| 12. The
Scottish Parliament should establish a process to
investigate, make recommendations and report on adaptive
and emerging technologies which should be used to aid
information flow. |
| |
| 13. When the
Scottish Parliament and/or individual MSPs have sought
views they should "close the loop" by telling
the electorate what they did with these views. |
| |
| 14. The
Scottish Parliament, when reporting on how consultation
took place, should emphasise the quality of consultation
as well as the quantity. |
| |
| 15. Unless
otherwise stated, the Scottish Parliament should make
responses to consultation publicly available. |
| |
| 16.
Community media centres should be developed across
Scotland where assistance is available to local
communities to develop submissions to the Scottish
Parliament. |
| |
| 17. The
Scottish Parliament should create a Citizen's Charter
which should set measurable standards for information
provision and responses to submissions. |
| |
| 18. The
Scottish Parliament should produce an annual report
covering standards achieved and an action plan to improve
performance. |
