Governments worldwide realize the importance of strengthening the active participation of citizens in the political process. The need for the social intelligence that citizens have to offer is essential if governments are to govern effectively and credibly. Also citizens in many countries are now demanding a more active role than just voting. It therefore comes as no surprise that the interest on public participation is increasing over the last years for practitioners and researchers alike.

Public participation can be considered as the process through which stakeholders influence and share control over priority setting, policy-making, resource allocations and access to public goods and services. It is a process of interaction between decision-making bodies (often governments) and citizens affected by those decisions. It is about giving citizens a voice on issues that matter to them and that will have an impact on their lives.

‘eParticipation’ is a recently proposed term to suggest the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) support in the traditional participatory process. The field of eParticipation is currently a rapidly evolving one.

There is a strong debate on whether citizen participation is really beneficial to society. On the one hand are the skeptics who doubt the government’s motives and assume it is shifting responsibility for tough decisions onto citizens. On the other are those who applaud a government that recognizes citizens have a role to play in major decisions over priorities, and that seeks an outcome that truly reflects the values of citizens.

There are several benefits of using new ICTs to enhance the democratic process, such as widespread and effective access to decision-makers; provision of relevant and timely information; interaction within and between institutionally, politically or geographically distinct networked communities; access to various positions in relation to policy issues; the capacity to register choices and awareness of the implications of different choices; and evidence that such deliberations have informed actions by governing institutions or elected representatives in relation to those issues.

Traditional forms of government policy making and political organisation, based upon centralised and hierarchical structures, one-to-many communications, and ‘push’ models of state–citizen interaction, have struggled to adapt to the decentralised, many-to-many forms of interaction of the Internet. Uses of the Internet by governments and political organisations have too often taken the form of “an electronic billboard [used] to post information without much effort at real interaction”. Such approaches tend to treat the Internet as an optional tool for more efficient communications, rather than as a distinctive communicative space with the potential to reconstitute and reconfigure social relations among its multiple users.

In order to smooth the transition from participation to eParticipation, there is a need to better understand ‘how things work’ in the traditional participatory process and what is to become ICT-enabled. This transition can not take place simply by using the features provided by the available tools without understanding the function and processes of the techniques involved in the participatory domain. Technology is an enabler not the solution hence it is crucial to understand how to integrate ICTs with traditional ‘offline’ tools and techniques. It is therefore important to obtain a better understanding on the significant areas of participation, the participatory techniques employed, and the relevant supporting ICT tools. For this purpose an analysis framework is presented (Figure 1) for the better understanding of the Participation and eParticipation domains.

This framework suggests that eParticipation can be divided into the field of traditional participation and the supporting ICTs. The starting point of the framework is the various participation areas that refer to the question of “what” i.e. defining the context of the participatory process. These areas involve various participatory techniques that address the issue of “how” the participatory process is carried out. These techniques can be enhanced and empowered with the use of ICT tools – that refer to the question of “how” to enable and conduct this process online – which are based on ICT technologies. The introduction of tools and technologies in the traditional participatory process leads to electronic participation (eParticipation).

For the better comprehension of the eParticipation domain each component part will be further analyzed to its constitutive elements.

Figure 1 – The eParticipation Framework

Participation areas have to do with the specific area or areas of citizen engagement and involvement in the democratic process. Participation is governed by a number of fundamental aspects of the democratic process. For example,

• making the views of politicians known,

• assessing the acceptance of these views on the side of constituents,

• making the views/objections on a political decision known,

• ensuring transparency of political action,

• offering the opportunity to co-formulate political decision making in certain cases, etc.

The most important participation areas are the following:

• Information Provision : This area has to do with providing access to information to the public.
• Consultation : This area covers the process of seeking views of individuals and groups
• Campaigning : This area addresses lobbying, protesting, petitioning and other forms of activism in order to form a collective action.
• Deliberation : This area addresses the participation in a public exchange of opinions and the formation of solutions in order to achieve consensus on politics developed from this exchange.
• Discourse : This area covers conversations and dialogue between citizens (C2C) and between elected representatives and citizens (G2C).
• Polling : The use of surveys to measure public opinion and/or sentiment by using sampling.
• Participatory Law-Making : This area refers to citizen participation in the process of law creation, during the initial formation stage, in the debate of draft legislation, during implementation and at the monitoring level.

Participatory techniques can be defined as the way and methods used to engage and involve citizens (but also stakeholders, decision-makers and politicians) in the democratic process. Therefore, participatory techniques address the issue of “how” to make the participatory process happen. There are numerous techniques that have been employed to facilitate participation and the analysis of these goes beyond the scope of this article (some examples being charettes, citizens’ juries, citizens’ panels, focus groups, consensus conferences, public hearings, deliberative polls etc.).

eParticipation tools consist of software applications, products, tools and components that have been used in eParticipation projects. The use of these tools and technologies in the domain of participation actually constitutes what is being called eParticipation. The most important tools are:

• eParticipation Chat Rooms : Web applications where a chat session takes place in real time, which is especially launched for eParticipation purposes
• eParticipation Discussion forum/board: Web applications for online discussion groups where users, usually with common interests, can exchange open messages on specific eParticipation issues.
• ePanels: Web applications where a ‘recruited’ set, as opposed to a self-selected set, of participants give their views on a variety of issues at specific intervals over a period of time
• ePetitioning: Web applications that host online petitions and allow citizens to sign in for a petition by adding their name and address online
• eDeliberative Polling: Web applications which combine deliberation in small group discussions with random sampling to facilitate public engagement on specific issues
• eConsultation: Web applications designed for consultations which allow a stakeholder to provide information on an issue and others to answer specific questions and/or submit open comments
• Virtual Communities: Web applications in which users with a shared interest can meet in virtual space to communicate and build relationships; the shared interest being within eParticipation contexts
• Online Surgeries: Web applications specifically designed to support elected representatives to engage with the citizens they represent

These tools are based on several of the latest information and communication technologies, as for instance e-mail, Instant Messaging, File Sharing, RSS Syndication, Streaming Media, Semantic Web Technology, Web Services, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Security Protocols (e.g. SSL), Agent Technologies.

The interest on eParticipation is increasing rapidly over the last years. The European Union has realized the importance of this rapidly growing and evolving domain and supports numerous research projects. An example of such project that thoroughly investigates the domain of eParticipation is the ‘DEMO-net’ network of excellence (DEMO-net stands for “The Democracy Network”; see www.demo-net.org).

Dr. Efthimios Tambouris, Mr. Naoum Liotas

Dr. Efthimios Tambouris is a researcher at CERTH/ITI and is also lecturing at the University of Macedonia. He has extensive experience in the area of eGovernment and eParticipation and has published more than 40 papers.

Naoum Liotas is a researcher at University of Macedonia in eParticipation and a PhD student.