Paper short abstract:

The Kenyan eParticipation platform Ushahidi generated a techno-discourse about the rise of African Cyberdemocracy and the power of crowd-sourcing that is probably more relevant than the real impact that these eParticipation platforms had or will have on the life of normal citizens and media activists.

Paper long abstract:

An eParticipation ecology is composed of five elements: actors, contents, traditional culture of participation, existing media skills and practices, discourses in conflicts (establishment vs. antagonists) and three macro-dimensions: cultural/traditional, political and socio-technological, in which the five elements are interacting with each other (Cavallo, 2010).

The term eParticipation is used to define a specific field of study that attempts to investigate how ICTs can be applied to improve citizen/community participation and consequently their capacity to influence government decision-making processes. In this respect, eParticipation projects are considered strategies to influence power in a specific direction.

It is important to specify that in the context of this article, eParticipation is not considered a neutral space in which different actors communicate amongst themselves.

In this article we will explore the possible applications of the eParticipation Ecology framework to the analysis of the most relevant Kenyan Techno-Discourses emerged in the last five years at local and international level.

Furthermore, in this article we will investigate eParticipation in relation to international development and the history of "North-South" relations in Sub-Saharan Africa from colonialism up to now.