This thesis aims at analysing conflicts between different ideals of democracy, using the example of a newly implemented citizen´s initiative reform. This reform gives citizens the right to make policy proposals to Swedish municipal councils. The proposals are to be handled in the same way as proposals from the municipal council members. An ideology analysis of various government documents as well as of an official state study (SOU) is carried out to identify and discuss the ideals of democracy that underpin the reform. The analysis is based on participatory democracy and electoral democracy theory and Arnstein's Eight Rungs on the Ladder of Citizen Participation is used to discuss different types of participation by the citizens.

Detta examensarbete handlar om orten Tärnaby som i dagsläget står stilla i utvecklingen. Detta har bidragit till en negativ trend som snabbt sprider sig. Syftet med detta arbete är att jobba med Tärnaby med hjälp av en metod som heter Participatory Design - ett gemensamt skapande där jag och min klasskompis Hanna Weinmar har jobbat tillsammans med ortsborna för att hitta en lösning som passar och är relevant för dem och för Tärnaby. Detta arbete har resulterat i en hemsida som heter Mitt Tärnaby som har syftet att sprida Tärnabornas idéer och hjälpa dem att hitta samarbeten som kan förverkliga dessa tankar och idéer. Ett forum där de kan kommunicera med varandra, för att bygga upp Tärnaby och det som finns där idag med hjälp av varandra..

The aim of this thesis is to explore the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Sweden and how the design may contribute to realize central democratic goods. The study records the different PB experiences in Sweden and focuses on one particular case, which is the only case that successfully qualifies as a genuine PB-process according to international standards and definitions. To examine this, the following questions are asked: which municipalities in Sweden have implemented Participatory Budgeting? How can the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting be described and to what extent does it enable the realization of central democratic goods? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the democratic goods inclusion, popular control, considered judgment and transparency? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the institutional goods of efficiency and transferability?The study is based on an institutional theory of democracy. The method used is a mixed method ideal type analysis that combines document analysis, surveys and interviews.

The number of blogs, from weblogs, are increasing every day. Blogs are also becoming more visible in the public debate as well as the awareness of their existance is rising among politicians and citizens. The aim of this thesis is to answer the question what democratic potential blogs can have. This question will be answered by initially studying the research that exists today about weblogs and democracy. The second part of the analysis consists of a selection of texts from weblogs that touches this subject.

Title: Share anything Swedish ? a study of CommunityOfSweden.com (Share anything Swedish ? en studie av CommunityOfSweden.com).Number of pages: 57 (64 including attachments).Author: Daniela Brandel.Tutor: Else Nygren.Course: Media and Communication Studies C.Period: Fall 2008.University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purposes/Aims: To learn what happens when the public-private tourism organisation VisitSweden starts an online community, where anyone is free to post stories and photos about a Swedish experience, and to understand how a participatory culture can help an organisation develop relevant material and thereby reach a wider audience.Material/Method: The study is an analysis of VisitSweden's community CommunityOfSweden, its structures as well as VisitSweden's use of the information posted by the readers on the community. Hence the material consists mainly of content from the community www.communityofsweden.com and the webpage www.visitsweden.com. In addition, the study is also based on an interview with VisitSwedens communitydriver Tommy Sollén.Main results: Members of CommunityOfSweden help VisitSweden to promote Sweden. This is possible because the community posting format and the participatory culture within the community are well designed and planned by VisitSweden, even though the organisation was not completely sure about the outcome.

A zoonosis is a disease or infection that is naturally transmitted between vertebrate animals and humans. The majority of infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonoses. Environments where wild animals, domestic animals and humans live in close proximity with no or small boundaries in the ecological system favor the transmission of diseases between animals and humans. The above described situation is more common in low income countries, where humans and animals live in high density and zoonoses are generally more common. The study was conducted in Cambodia.

The aim of this study is to examine how and in what way users of the public participate and affect the archival information that is to be preserved for the future through the examination of three archival projects involving public participation. The study seeks to examine if participation of the public could lead to increased democracy and diversity of information in the archives. The study will be performed through the examination of three participatory archives all tied to traditional archival institutions.The study is based on the theoretical framework of Benn and Gaus and their notions of public and private which they discuss using the key words access, agency and interest. The study also takes into consideration Laura Millar?s theories of social memory as a means for the public good.

Uncertainty is a well-known phenomenon that is recurring in biographies, imaginative literature and science, but is less studied in nursing science. The aim of this participatory action research project was to, in collaboration with nursing students; explore nursing activities for relieving patients? uncertainty. A qualitative approach was chosen with focus groups and the text was content analyzed. The students studied their third semester on a nursing program.

The findings in this case study are mainly based on material collected during a field trip with a fellow student to Laos in February-March 2005, which was sponsored by Sida through a Minor Field Study scholarship. The original interest was to study a political aid project (Governance and Administrative Reform Project Luang Prabang, GPAR LP) in a country like Laos with very complex preconditions such as one-party polity. In Laos my interest in evaluation of political aid grew mainly because I found out that the two donors in the project, Sida and the UNDP, had reached different conclusions in their respective evaluations of the project.The main interest in this thesis has been to study how donors have evaluated a political aid project. The study shows that Sida and UNDP used, what in the literature usually is referred to as, Conventional evaluation as methodology when they conducted their evaluations of GPAR LP. The study also shows that the main reason for the different points of view that are expressed in the evaluations depend on a lack of dialogue and consensus, regarding for the project crucial concepts, rather than choice of evaluation methodology.

In order to understand user behaviour and navigation patterns, user logging is today widely used in analysis and development of user interfaces. These user logs tend to be quite many and can contain a lot of different data. A big issue is how to process and display this data in a perspicuous way to the stakeholder. This study is about how to develop a prototype to handle this issue. It was solved by various methods from human-computer interaction.

Detta är en undersökning kring sätt att arbeta involverande med barn. Inom en del av designfältet håller ett nytt förhållningssätt på att växa fram. Det är en designpraktik som utgår från brukarens position och som involverar brukaren som en fullvärdig deltagare i designprocessen redan från början. Området tillhör en engelskspråkig diskurs och benämns än så länge med sitt engelska namn:participatory design.Undersökningen utgår från frågeställningenHur kan man, med utgångspunkt i teorier om participatory design, forma arbetssätt för att involvera barn i designprojekt som rör deras närmiljö? Och vidare, genom den frågeställningen kommer undersökningen även att närma sig frågan: Hur beskriver barnen på Jordbro parklek sin närmiljö ur ett designperspektiv?Informanterna i undersökningen är barn som alla är bosatta i Jordbro som är en förort till Stockholm.

Det ha?r arbetet syftar till att underso?ka hur man integrerar sin slutanva?ndare i designprocessen fo?r att go?ra dem delaktiga i slutresultatet. Hur man kan fra?mja ka?nslan av delaktighet, stolthet och engagemang fo?r sin ort genom ett gemensamt skapande..

Title: Journalism 2.0: About the journalist's perspective on citizen participation and its influenceon the news content.Purpose: The aim with this study was to examine whether, and if so how, professional journalists experience that the production of news has changed as the media development has progressed and the citizens opportunities for active participation in this process has potentially expanded.Research questions:Does professional journalists experience that the opportunities for citizen participation in the news making-process has changed with the spread and accessibility of new media- if so, in what ways?Wheatear professional journalists experience that the relationship between themselves and their news sources has changes with the spread and accessibility of new media?What consequences can an empowerment from citizens have on the production of news and on the professional role of the journalist?Theory: This essay is based on theories about convergence, gatekeeping, agenda building, participatory journalism, news sources and the journalistic profession.Method: The survey is based on ten qualitative interviews with ten professional journalists, eight reporters and two web editors from the newspapers NWT and VF.Results: The results of this survey shows that the citizens? opportunities in influencing the production of news has partly changed. The journalists do not experience that citizen participation affects their professional role. Citizens have always had an impact on the production of news but new technology offers citizens and journalists new channels that facilitate the communication and interaction. The gatekeeping process is protecting the decision-making role of the journalist, which restrains citizen participation.

The aim of this essay is to explore the lived citizenship and its ideal. First, the form and expression of citizenship practice and ideal is explored through a qualitative interwiev study of ten citizens in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. The perception and expectations of the nature of citizenship, presented by the informants, is then compared to their citizen ideal, as well as to the ideal presented and promoted by the Swedish government. The point of departure is theory of democracy. The essay calls attention to an observed lack of empirical studies in the field of deliberative theory of democracy as well as studies that more broadly bring the theory down to empirical earth.

The aim of our study was to examine Swedish crime reporters? approach to the social medium Flashback. Our main focus was the crime reporters? use of the medium Flashback, and attitude towards their own use of media ethics in relation to the medium Flashback.Flashback as a medium is not obliged to any media ethics and lacks a legally accountable publisher. In the search for information about committed crimes people tends to visit Flashback for the information that the traditional media cannot offer.