A personal history of Minnesota Electronic Democracy, 1994

This article is an account of the early history of Minnesota Electronic Democracy (MN E-Democracy). The project was among the first political sites on the Internet and featured the first online debates involving political candidates at the state and national level. The focus of the article reports on the process of constructing the project, the structure of the public forums in which approximately 700 citizens participated, and the thinking behind the configuration of the online debates, which were forwarded into the public forums, creating a successful electronic town hall. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.