Links

MOMENTUM Portal of eParticipation projects

The main objective of MOMENTUM Project is to strengthen political, social, scientific, and technological excellence in eParticipation by integrating results and practices of relevant initiatives building upon the ICT research capacities of individuals and organisations spread across Europe. MOMENTUM is a Specific Support Action project funded under the European Commission’s eParticipation programme (eParticipation 2007/1).

eParticipation preparatory action

The objectives of the eParticipation Preparatory Action are to demonstrate how using modern ICT tools and applications can make it easier for people to participate in decision-making and can contribute to better legislation. The action was initiated by the European Parliament and launched in 2006. It supports pilot projects in real-life environments that demonstrate the use of Information and Communication Technologies to bolster citizens’ participation in democratic decision-making.

eParticipation

eGovernment for the people - Good practice in eParticipation with links to the eParticipation leaflet, eParticipation preparatory action, FP5 and FP6 research projects on eParticipation & the Report on national eParticipation initiatives.

Community Portal of eParticipation Projects

Initiative to increase citizens participation in EU legislative process

LEGESE - Easing Participation in Legislative Processes

LEGESE is an eParticipation Action project that is pilot trialing a new service to encourage easy communication and information exchange for effective public participation in the legislation implementation phase of European initiated legislation at the local and regional levels that are most directly relevant to most citizens’ lives.

eParticipate - European eService for Democratic Renewal & Citizen Engagement.

eParticipate provides an open integrated standard web-based network & gateway of existing “best of breed” applications (called Public-i) to enable public bodies to implement and benefit from a range of eParticipation tools to broaden the participation of citizens in the democratic process

FEED 'Federated eParticipation Systems for Cross-Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues'

provides users with seamless access to existing federated content that matches their information search requirements, with a focus on Environmental and Energy issues. Read more.

DEMO-net: The eParticipation Network

DEMO-net is a Network of Excellence project funded under the European Commission's sixth framework programme: Information Society Technologies IST (FP6-2004-27219). The project started 1 January 2006, will be funded for 4 years.

Demos@Work 'European-wide discussion between elected representatives and civil society':

facilitating European-wide discussions between elected representatives and civil society on emerging policy issues in the field of public health, particularly the harmful effects of smoking.

Ideal-EU 'Integrating the Drivers of e-Participation at Regional Level in Europe':

raising awareness on the latest evidence on climate change, and appropriate policy responses, together with assessments of the financial impact and costs of inaction.

VEP 'The Virtual European Parliament'

creates a virtual European Parliament in which young citizens can participate via mobiles and web2.0 technologies and tools.

VOICE 'Giving European People a voice in EU-legislation'

enhancing the participation of citizens from regions in Germany and Spain in EU decision-making in the area of consumer protection.

eCommittee

provides citizens with the opportunity to follow issues in the European Parliament's Environment Committee and to interact with MEPs. The focus is on climate change.

DALOS 'Drafting legislation with ontology-base support'

project aims to provide law-makers and European citizens with linguistic and knowledge management tools to assist in accessing and retrieving as well as drafting legal texts.

SEAL 'Smart Environment for Assisting the drafting and debating of Legislation'

developing an integrated working environment to help those involved in drafting legal texts. The project provides the tools to make it easier to create legal drafts and connections from and to existing legal sources.

LEX-IS (Enabling Participation of the Youth in the Public Debate of Legislation among Parliaments, Citizens and Businesses in the European Union)

Aims to improve the legislative process in National Parliaments through enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages (legislative drafting and public debate of draft law) with the use of state-of-the-art ICT-tools and methodologies.

LEXIPATION 'An advanced ICT tool for enhancing Citizen's participation in the legislative process'

provides tools to aid interaction between members of parliaments and citizens or groups of citizens at the regional level in four member states (Germany, Greece, Italy, and UK)

TID+ 'Enabling citizens' initiative to eParticipation'

based on an Estonian experience (Today I Decide) which enables citizens to propose, discuss and express views on new legislation initiatives, while allowing decision-makers to deliver a response to them, this project will adapt and make available this service in a cross-border environment.

Wikipedia eParticipation Page

Defines eParticipation and provides some useful links, but needs to be edited and completed.

Planned EU 'political MySpace'

Planned social networking site for MEPs and MPs to boost contacts between politicians across Europe and promote a trans-European democracy. Officially to be launched in October - is a website currently under construction that aims to work along the same lines as the popular MySpace or Facebook social networking services, but in addition to linking social contacts aims to foster debate about legislative proposals coming both out of Brussels and from national parliaments.

Citizenscape Western Australia - CommunityBuilder

Citizenscape Australia - Resources and Guides for active citizenship from Western Australia Provides a wealth of practical information on citizenship-related organizations, activities, resources and projects. This Western Australian government site is particularly useful for those who want to take an active role in shaping the future of their community through government related decision-making. This site has been designed for citizens; decision-makers and those interested in engaging citizens in civic debate. Information on Citizenscape outlines how you can get involved in government decision making. It will be particularly useful to individuals and civic advocates who wish to learn more about how to influence decision-makers.

ARIADNE Newsletters on eParticipation

Quarterly Newsletters for advancing technologies, ideas and provocative exchange of views and opinions in the areas of e-government, e-participation and governance, prepared as part of the dissemination and public awareness activities of the ALTEC Research Programmes Division http://research.altec.gr

DoWire Groups - Online Communities of Practice &E-mail Updates

DoWire Groups promotes international online information and knowledge exchange on e-democracy, e-government, and democracy practices. It is the online place for those building information-age democracy, governance, and active citizenship in the 21st Century. Each online group is an integrated e-mail list and web forum with file sharing and more. You may choose e-mail (default setting), web, or both for discussions. E-mail updates from our Democracies Online Newswire (blog version) and our low volume DoWire site Announcements are also available. Launched as DO-WIRE in 1998, the Newswire reaches over 2750 members across 100 countries.

eParticipation & eDemocracy Network on ePractice.eu

The eParticipation and eDemocracy Network is open to all interested in these issues, whether at sub-national, national, European or trans-national levels. The issues covered are potentially broad, such as eEngagement, eDeliberation, eInvolvement, eLegislation and eVoting, as well as eDecision, eRule and ePolicy-making.

PEP-NET Pan European eParticipation Network

PEP-NET will be a European network of all stakeholders active in the field of eParticipation. PEP-NET therefore already includes public bodies, solution providers and citizen organizations as well as researchers and scientists. The network is open to all organizations willing and actively trying to advance the idea and use of eParticipation in Europe.

Internet based participation projects in the UK & Germany

We present a variety of internet based participation projects in the United Kingdom and in Germany. Our aim is to show diverse developments and highlight examples of good practice. Furthermore, we would like to encourage people to join one of these projects or to start their own. Provided by the British Council Germany and politik-digital.de.

my.barackobama.com - Community Engagement Tools

Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama. The scale and size of this community and its work is unprecedented. Individuals created more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made millions of calls to neighbours about this campaign. There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations played a critical role in Barack Obama's victory. What has made My.BarackObama unique hasn't been the technology itself, but the people who used the online tools to coordinate offline action. My.BarackObama has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world connections between people who are hungry to change politics. The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on, and people will continue to use the tools to participate, collaborate and interact, to bring about the promised change.

Citizen Participation in Wiki & Facebook Era

Excellent slides from Institute of Public Administration workshop 24 Oct08, Dublin , Ireland on Web 2.0 in public sector.

EuroPetition - eParticipation through Petitioning in Europe

EuroPetition is a trans-European ePetitions service that will use the latest Web 2.0 online services to coordinate local, cross-border and pan-European Citizen Initiative EuroPetitions from citizens across the EU, and thus strengthen and broaden citizens' participation in democratic decision-making and contribute to better legislation. It is another eParticipation Action project.

What on earth is Citizenscape???

Action Research Diary Blog on the evaluation & operation of the CitizenScape services.

CitizenScape Blog

A Blog on the operation and use of the CitizenScape services to enable user feedback & discussion.

Guide to Social Media for Organizations

Interesting insider's Guide to introduce Web 2.0 & social media into large organisations, such as the public sector.

WAVE - Welcoming Argument Visualisation to Europe

An eParticipation Action project that is using Argument Visualisation techniques to make more accessible and easier to understand the impact of EU environmental legislation on climate change. The project will be carried out in Lithuania, France and the UK. Excellent visuatisation tool at http://debategraph.org

U@MareNostrum - eParticipation in the Mediterranean coastal zone

An eParticipation Action project that will give local people a say in the management of water and marine environmental protection in the French Riviera, Valencia and the Ionian Islands and allowing them to monitor how relevant EU legislation is implemented in their area.

VoiceS: integrating Semantics, Social Software and Serious Games into eParticipation

An eParticipation Action project that is complementary to the VOICE project (www.give-your-voice.eu). VoiceS is integrating a serious game and a semantic search function into the existing German and Spanish VoicE platforms. The project was launched on January 1st, 2009 and will run for two years

HuWY - Hub Websites for Youth Participation

An eParticipation Action project that is supporting young people’s eParticipation in policies about the Internet and its governance, through a distributed discussion. HuWY partners provide information, support and organise influential audiences for young people’s suggestions. The Hub websites hold supporting information and structured space for results and feedback from policy-makers. Young people choose the topics and questions, host the discussions on their web pages and post the results on the Hubs

VIDI - Visualising the Impact of the legislation by analysing public Discussions using statistical means

An eParticipation Action project that will provide an efficient toolset for an advance visualization of messages posted in an on-line discussion forum, that will support „monitoring“ and analyzing discussions. The ultimate goal is a better understanding of emer­ging arguments and ideas contributing to the policy making process.

eMPOWER - Empowering citizens to influence decision making & policy formulation on environmental issues

An eParticipation Action project that is using eParticipation ICT tools to support ePetitioning to enable transparent, interactive and democratic communication processes, the results of which will be joint proposals, initiatives and viewpoints of NGOs and citizens regarding environmental issues such as global climate change, national parks and forests, oceans and biodiversity, green taxation, oil drilling, air pollution, water pollution and management, and more.

Empirical Analysis of the Creation, Use and Adoption of Social Computing Applications

JRC IPTS Study, by Corina Pascu, 7/2008, EUR Number: 23415 EN The objective of this report is to provide a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing application areas: blogging, podcasting, collaborative content, social networking multimedia sharing, social tagging and social gaming. In addition, the report offers a definition of social computing in order to clarify what is meant, in the face of many different angles, and points to the new area of mobile social computing. The dynamics of user participation in social computing are also discussed. Finally, extensive empirical data is presented in the Annex to this report.

Social Computing: Study on the Use and Impact of Online Social Networking

JRC IPTS Study, by Romina Cachia, 11/2008, EUR Number: 23565 EN. This study presents results of a case study on SNS, as part of an exploratory research project. It argues that though SNS can appear to be similar, many of them are, in fact, quite different in terms of purpose and use. In general, these sites have led to new ways of managing and maintaining social networks, whereby personal profiles and social networks are being visualised and disclosed to others and the boundaries between the virtual and the real are disappearing. As a result, both opportunities and concerns arise. Policymakers should be aware of these and researchers should further investigate their implications.

Social Computing: Study on the Use and Impacts of Collaborative Content

JRC IPTS Study by Kirsti Ala-Mutka, EUR Number: 23572 EN. The report provides an assessment of the use, adoption and impact of collaborative content applications, giving an in-depth description of YouTube, Wikipedia and blogging, and discussing the socio-economic impacts and challenges of collaborative content. The great variety of collaborative content applications is providing people with access to a diversity of content and information, new relations to other people based on common interests, and a new tool for collaboration. Organizations can not avoid responding to the challenges that arise, but there are various ways in which they can also benefit from the opportunities available. A major challenge is how to nurture a responsible digital culture, where users adopt a critical attitude to both creating and using the content, and where the collaborative communities have sustainable models for participation and content quality management.

Socio-economic Impact of Social Computing: Proceedings of a validation and policy options workshop

JRC IPTS Study by Yves Punie (Editor), EUR Number: 23531 EN. This report presents the major outcomes of a validation and policy options workshop on social computing, held at IPTS in Seville, on 26-27 February 2008. It points to a number of relevant issues (including methodological and conceptual ones) that need to be taken into account in a study of the socio-economic impacts of social computing. It argues that there is little room for direct policy interventions in social computing but that framework conditions and impacts at sector-level (e.g. education, government) need to be considered.

Impact of web 2.0 on Europe's economy and society

Report from JRC. The rapid growth of web 2.0, or social computing, allows users to play an influential role in the way commercial and public products and services are shaped. The report "The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy", published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered. The report shows that social computing goes beyond individual networking and entertainment, as it empowers tens of millions of Europeans to support their work, health, learning and citizenship in innovative ways. The research found that social computing is reshaping work practices, as employees join communities of interest outside their organisations to improve their knowledge and skills. Social innovation enabled by social computing contributes to improved lifelong learning processes, business competitiveness, social inclusion and integration of immigrants, among others. The study highlights the trend towards more user-centric and effective services as well as new forms of civic and political participation. It also analyses emerging risks and challenges such as a new 'digital divide' as regards the skills required to fully benefit from the opportunities of web 2.0, and emerging threats related to security, safety and privacy. The report argues that European policy-makers are well placed to set favourable conditions for the spreading of social computing practices and foresees that social computing will further evolve and grow into a fundamental part of the digital networked society.

Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services

This IPTS report gives an overview of the main trends of Social Computing, in the wider context of an evolving public sector, and in relation to relevant government trends and normative policy visions within and across EU Member States on future public services. It then provides an exhaustive literature review of research and practice in the area of Social Computing and identifies its key impact areas in the public sector. Evidence from the study indicates that Social Computing technologies, applications and values have already been adopted in many areas of government activity. Social Computing affects several aspects of public service, related to both the front office (citizen-government relations) and the back office activities of public administrations. Social Computing is leading to new forms of ICT-enabled participation, capable of enhancing users’ social awareness and involvement. Social Computing is also transforming relationships and ways of working within and between public sector organizations and opens the way to innovative service delivery mechanisms.

Sustainable eParticipation - JeDEM, Journal of eDemocracy & Open Government

Issue of the JeDEM, Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government, which focuses on "Sustainable eParticipation" and includes invited papers by Mechthild Rohen (Head of Unit, ICT for Government and Public Services, European Commission), Thanassis Chrissafis (Coordinator of eParticipation, European Commission), Hille Hinsberg (Estonian Government Office) , Paul Johnston (Cisco) as well as peer-reviewed papers and case studies. Issue created in cooperation with PEP-NET, the Pan European eParticipation Network.