| Abstract: | Several off-line mechanisms have been developed and applied for the participation of citizens in government policy making and services design. The increasing adoption of ICT, and especially the Internet, by individuals allows the development of a new generation of digital mechanisms for public participation (e-participation). The dominant digital mechanism has been in the last ten years the development of official e-participation websites by government agencies, which provide to the citizens information on government activities and also policies and services under formulation, and allow them to participate in relevant consultations in electronic fora. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism has been much lower than expectations. In this paper are presented three different digital mechanisms for public participation, which have been developed by the authors as part of European research projects. The first of them is based on the use of structured e-forum, in which citizens can enter only annotated postings according to a predefined discussion ontology. The second is based on the use of a central platform which can publish policy-related content and micro-applications to multiple social media simultaneously, and also collect and process data on citizens’ interaction with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). While the previous mechanisms were moderated by government, the third one – still under development as part of the European research project NOMAD - is non-moderated. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in numerous social media and other sources (e.g. blogs and micro-blogs, news sharing sites, online forums, etc.) by citizens freely, without any government initiation, stimulation or moderation, and the advanced processing of this content. |
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Greek