In this context, it is worth mentioning an ongoing EU-funded project entitled LexiPation (www.lexipation.eu) that is one of the six preparatory actions set forth in late 2006 by the European Commission in the topic of eParticipation. LexiPation is concerned with a novel use and integration of state-of-the-art methodologies and ICT tools to enable interaction between members of parliaments and citizens or socio-economic groups, at the regional level in four Member States of the European Union (Germany, Greece, Italy, and UK).
LexiPation consists of a technological platform that is modular in nature, and allows to conduct moderated online discourses enabling interactive and asynchronous communication between large numbers of participants. The threshold to participate is quite low: users can contribute anonymously and spontaneously, they can participate actively or as observers, they can either write contributions, take part in polls, ballots and surveys or communicate with other users on peer-to-peer basis. Furthermore, people can form coalitions by getting in touch with like-minded people effortlessly and discuss certain topics or subtopics of mutual interest.
Online discourses are a promising approach for different target groups and frameworks.
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They can be set up for a broad public debate with a high number of yet unknown, anonymous people as well as for discussions with representatives, stakeholders or delegates.
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They are not depending on known and already committed participants.
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They are able to cope with a higher level of fluctuation of participants as e.g. virtual working groups and though be able to come to specific results.
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The basic idea is that the people will be attracted by the ongoing discussion and their commitment to the particular community will have to develop during the course of the debate.
The LexiPation platform transcends the common approach of structuring user contributions in hierarchical and inflexible “threads”. Instead, each contribution is deemed as equal; its position depends on the meta information attributed to it, for example the number of votes, hits, or feedback articles. The moderator (as well as any user) may choose and combine these pieces of meta information to generate specific “views” (i.e. filtered and sorted lists of articles). Together with its innovative capabilities to structure discourses on a time-line and to integrate a huge variety of voting and rating mechanisms, the system fosters goal-oriented on-line deliberations.
Most features of this flexible “discourse machine” can be easily switched on and off by moderators in the administration backend: for example, the option to comment on any contribution may be turned off for the whole system but turned on for one specific view.
However, the main strength of the system emerges from user interaction; e.g. the users are allowed to create links between contributions or assign contributions to a specific position on a map, which results in visually stunning cluster effects.
Furthermore, content is effortlessly made available due to compliance with the relevant accessibility and syndication standards. The next picture outlines what has been called the “participatory process” which is always concerned with one main topic to be commonly discussed on a limited timeline (usually three weeks) under the guidance of online moderators:
Outline of the Participatory Process within LexiPation
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| The process provides support for three phases of moderate online discourses: |
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broadening, |
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deepening, and |
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consolidating the discussion |
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In the broadening phase the discussion is initiated and information is gathered from as many sources as possible about the problem situation and the interests, positions and ideas of the stakeholders. The system supports this phase with tools to help moderators with clustering and structuring contributions and visualize relationships among them. The result of this phase is an outline and summary of the discussion thus far.
The main task of the deepening phase is to address selected issues in more depth. Therefore, several thematic sub-forums can be opened (their number is not limited). The system provides measures to help the participants break up into sub-groups, conduct online surveys / polls and collaborate on the formulation of joint position statements.
The task of the third and final phase is to consolidate the results from the sub-groups and to summarize and visualize the main points of the discussion in a final document. In certain cases, users can also rank different concepts of participants by means of a rating mechanism in order to find the best solution / draft solution.
This flexible framework supports integration of nearly every discourse process model used by on-line moderators. Since 2003, many different e-Participation projects have been deployed throughout Germany with up to several thousand participants, for example in the cities of Hamburg and Munich. The trials now being performed in the four selected testbeds of Hamburg (Germany), Thessaloniki (Greece), Massa (Italy) and Alston (UK) are focusing the discussions on concrete draft legislations which have priorly been identified and appropriately selected together with the partner communities. |
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Apart from their territorial distribution, the pilots are representative of four different “levels” of European public administration, namely:
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the City State/Regional level (Hamburg), |
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the Prefectural/Provincial level (Thessaloniki), |
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the Municipality level (Massa), |
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the Association of small Communities level (Alston Moor). |
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Borrowing from the Living Labs methodology as presented in Error! Reference source not found. we have followed the 5 configuration steps described below:
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Contextualisation: meaning all the preparatory actions involved in the trial, from the collection of background material to its publication on the public administration’s web site;
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Selection of participants: meaning the activities (if any) aimed to restrict / widen the panel of citizens and/or stakeholders representatives that will be involved in the trial;
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Description of the thematic focus: an integral part of the trial, were its objectives are stated and pieces of draft legislation (if existing) are shown for evaluation;
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Running of the trial: use of the discourse machine to reach an agreement within the participants (if possible) or to collect and cluster the public opinion through moderated online discourses;
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Feedback from results: the internal, and usually partly disclosed, activities leading to harmonisation of law-making with the trial results.
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| Though the trials are currently on course and no self-evaluation activity has been put in place until now, it can be argued that this discursive approach based on ‘small groups participation’ can be a valid (i.e. more ‘democratic’) alternative to external audits and avoids both exclusion and irrelevance, i.e. the major drawbacks of current representative and deliberative democracy experiences: |
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It is open to the mass participation of citizens, not just to the discussion of a few elected or appointed representatives, while avoiding time and cost limitations to enlarging debates, if not the ‘bandwagon’ effect of certain electronic referenda;
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It can include non-trivial and meaningful discussion topics for the public decision making, without undermining the elected representatives ‘right to decide’ and providing them with no-nonsense advice and support, thanks to the presence of moderators and to the particular structure of the participatory process.
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Another evident feature of this approach is that it does not only make room for the expression of a ‘separate judgement’ by the citizens (with respect to the elected or appointed officials), but it also sets the conditions for a timely, informed and responsible judgement, that are definitely harder to achieve.
Finally, it can provide a reasonable solution to the ‘dilemma’ between representative and deliberative democracy, allowing people to have their say without dismissing or undermining the familiar gateway of free elections as access to the power and governance.
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