Vienna.
It's the final session of EDEM 2009, and we begin with a paper by Edith Maier, whose focus is on trying to increase participation in e-participatory efforts. This is in the context of Austrian bottom-up e-participation efforts in relation to globalisation and global solidarity projects.
The barriers to participation include lack of motivation of participants, of traceability of contributions, of transparency with regard to roles of participants, of opinion-mining across all participants to identify shared interests, and of feedback and political support for outcomes. There is an overall lack of impact, then, leading to a disenchantment amongst participants, thus to a negative attitude to those in power, and thence finally to low levels of use of official e-participation sites.
Some remedies may include a provision of services which the public is interested in, a focus on civil society and citizen-led initiatives, and an empowering of civil society groups to become engaged in policy making (by better exploiting both ICT tools which they already use, and those they do not yet use but which may be helpful). Here, the main barriers to an effective use of tools are often organisational (e.g. problems in coordinating the provision of tools) and societal (e.g. user acceptance). So, it becomes necessary to provide configuration guidance, and process support between different phases of the participation process.
This proces includes may variously include agenda setting, ideas collection, deliberation, arbitration, petition, and feedback phases, and process support may be necessary between each of these. There is a need for a 'function navigator' toolkit which is based on best practice process models derived from existing knowledge on e-participation projects; this would provide process support for configuring and maintaining a platform with the tools that are best matched to the requirements of a particular initiative. It would include a dialogue system that elicits the characteristics of a planned initiative from the organisers, and enables users to choose from a set of predefined choices in a decision tree of possible choices.
What is necessary here is to increase the overall impact of e-participation through the closing of feedback loops, and by providing better structure and categorisation of the main threads of arguments to aggregate and generalise opinions and associated arguments so that their essence becomes apparent. This may visualise opinions, their preconditions, pros and cons, and implications for policy making. It is also important to ensure the traceability of contributions in relation to other users (giving users a sense of their positioning in relation to others in the community), and in terms of their take-up and use in policy-making.
Much of this relies on the establishment of central hubs for information and opinion flow; these would serve to connect citizens and policymakers, and act as collaborative environments where representatives from civil society, the administration, and the formal political spheres come together. Out of this may come best practice models for various kinds of bottom-up initiatives, e.g. for chanelling arguments from local and regional to national and European levels; a dialogue-based function navigator which provides support in setting up a site and reconfigurig it as required; a process support component that guides the phases of an initiative and provides support for the transitions between individual phases and monitors contributions; and a toolbox of elements which may be used in the process.
