132 research outputs found

    The shape of eParticipation: Characterizing an emerging research area

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    The phenomenon of eParticipation is receiving increasing attention, demonstrated by recent technology implementations, experiments, government reports, and research programs. Understanding such an emerging field is a complex endeavor because there is no generally agreed upon definition of the field, no clear overview of the research disciplines or methods it draws upon, and because the boundaries of the field are undecided. Using conventional literature review techniques, we identify 131 scientific articles considered important for the field's theoretical development. This sample provides the starting point for a grounded analysis leading to the development of an overview model: the field of eParticipation seen from a researcher's perspective. The model provides structure for understanding the emerging shape of the field as well as an initial indication of its content. It also provides the basis for developing research agendas for the future

    Mapping eParticipation Research: Four Central Challenges

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    The emerging research area of eParticipation can be characterized as the study of technology-facilitated citizen participation in (democratic) deliberation and decision-making. Using conventional literature study techniques, we identify 105 articles that are considered to be highly relevant to eParticipation. We develop a definitional schema that suggests different ways of understanding an emerging socio-technical research area and use this schema to map the research contributions identified. This allows us make an initial sketch of the scientific character of the area and its central concerns, theories, and methods. We extend the analysis to define four central research challenges for the field: understanding technology and participation; the strategic challenge; the design challenge; and the evaluation challenge. This article thus contributes to a developing account of eParticipation, which will help future researchers both to navigate the research area and to focus their research agendas

    e-Participation in Austria: Trends and Public Policies

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    The paper is a first step to assess the status of e-participation within the political system in Austria. It takes a top-down perspective focusing on the policy framework related to citizensÂŽ rights in the digital environment, the role of public participation and public policies on e-participation in Austria. The analysis of the development of e-participation in Austria as well as of social and political trends regarding civic participation in general and its electronic embedding, show a remarkable recent increase of e-participation projects and related initiatives. The paper identifies main institutional actors actively dealing with or promoting e-participation and reviews government initiatives as well as relevant policy documents specifically addressing and relating to e-participation or e-democracy. Finally, it takes a look at the state of the evaluation of e-participation. A major conclusion is that e-participation has become a subject of public policies in Austria; however, the recent upswing of supportive initiatives for public participation and e-participation goes together with ambivalent attitudes among politicians and administration towards e-participation.e-participation, e-democracy, citizensÂŽ rights, institutional actors, public policies, government initiatives, evaluation

    The Use of Electronic Participation Tools in Urban Planning Projects in Toronto, Ontario

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    The public’s involvement in urban planning projects has been a contested and evolving topic. In this paper, I address how planners have changed their approach to participation in planning and how they are incorporating electronic participation tools into that process. I have adapted the assessment framework by Tambouris, Liotas and Tarabanis (2007) for the use of electronic participation tools in public policy consultations to urban planning projects. I evaluated eighteen active urban planning projects in Toronto, Ontario, comparing how these projects are using electronic participation tools to engage the community. I found that electronic participation tools are, for the most part, being used to inform members of the community rather than for drawing feedback and that these tools are not being used to create opportunities for the community to make substantial changes to the projects. Members of the community who are using the electronic participation tools are self-selected participants and therefore tend to be more likely to engage in planning processes generally. The main take away from my research is that urban planning projects in Toronto are integrating electronic participation tools into their participation strategy, but the electronic participation tools are not being used strategically to remedy current barriers and gaps to participation

    Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

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    According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value

    A Semantic Deliberation Model for e-Participation

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    There have been very few attempts so far to develop a comprehensive and rigorous conceptualization for deliberations in e-participation. Without a rigorous and formal conceptualization of deliberation, consistent content descriptions creation, deliberation records sharing and seamless exploration is difficult. In addition, no e-participation deliberation ontology exists to support citizen-led e-participation particularly when considering contributions made on the social media platforms. This work bridges this gap by providing a rich conceptualization and corresponding formal and executable ontology for deliberation in the context of e-participation. The semantic model covers the core concepts of technology-mediated political discussion and explicitly supports the integrated citizen- and government-led model of e-Participation enabled by social media. Results from the use of the ontology in describing e-Participation deliberation information at Local Government projects are also presented

    A collaborative discourse or only a collection of voices? An exploratory study of the use of social media in the e-participation domain

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    Social media have been introduced in the eParticipation domain to engage citizens in collabora-tive discourse, allowing for low cost and low effort exchanges of information among actors who are distant from time and space perspectives. Such online communities rely heavily on the tech-nical capabilities of social media to enable community dynamics, and the interest in what oppor-tunities and challenges social media provide for engaging in collaborative discourse is high. Sev-eral studies have discussed the engagement of individuals in online communities through social media; however, there is still room for contributions shedding light on how information is actually exchanged through these digital platforms. We tackle this point in this paper by running an ex-ploratory analysis of the discourse that is developing on social media channels used by represent-atives of a political party (the Five Star Movement) to engage citizens in discussions of proposals and idea generation, and we reflect on our findings in light of key characteristics of the public sphere. The results of our study show that social media are mainly used as places for engaging cit-izens, supporting representatives, and holding them accountable for their actions. Based on the results of our exploratory work, we formulate some considerations for future studies of social me-dia usage in the eParticipation field

    Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation

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    Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing–and contesting–interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the 'Web 2.0' paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization

    Feasibility Analysis of Various Electronic Voting Systems for Complex Elections

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