Democracy functions of information technology

Information technology, IT, may play an important part in any community as a supporting tool in the democratic process. The conditions for that to happen are primarily a genuine wish of the community members to take democratic action, having access to the technology and the skills to use it. The purpose of this paper is to establish the "democratic functions of IT" in what we call "the Swedish democratic model". The model describes democracy, in its perfect state, as a political governing based on citizen control, state governed by law and ability to carry out political decisions. In order to achieve this purpose we first identify the concepts of democracy referring to literature on democracy applying to "the Swedish democracy model". With these concepts in mind, we then identify the concepts of democracy of information technology by referring to literature describing various aspects of IT. The inventory of concepts had to be extensive in order to avoid a bias of perspective. We have thus made a thorough survey of the concepts of democracy and information technology to find the necessary number of aspects. The democracy functions of IT have been defined as the various ways of how IT may support the individual and the various social communities in "the Swedish democracy model". By the individual we mean the citizen as a private person acting on his own or in different social networks. We define social communities as organisations and public administrations at a local or central level. Seven functions have been identified: support for communication, support for human networks, support for efficiency, support for political decisions, support for authority decisions, support for community service, and support for public insight. Our conclusion is that an IT system containing these functions has a great potential to support the democratic process in any community, regardless the political course of its government.