eParticipation Initiatives in Europe: Learning from Practitioners

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and derive the success factors of eParticipation initiatives according to the practitioners' view. For this purpose, a European survey took place using questionnaires. The results suggest that the tools and technologies currently employed are mainly general purpose and not specifically designed for eParticipation. The results further suggest that success factors can be grouped together in seven categories, namely commitment by the government; usability; combining online with offline channels; a thorough communication and promotion plan; security and privacy; organisational issues; and topics' complexity and quality of participation. A comparison with published success factors of eGovernment initiatives suggests there are similarities but also significant differences. We anticipate that the results will be of interest to practitioners as they distil others experience in a usable form. We further anticipate that this work will be of interest to researchers as it will enable validating eParticipation evaluation models.

Predicting Citizens Acceptance of Government-led e-Participation Initiatives through Social Media: A Theoretical Model

“…Another important factor that may cause limited citizens engagement is the lack of commitment exhibited by many government officials to open truly deliberation to citizens [9,35,49,57]. In fact, many citizens' opinions, views, and feedback are been rarely considered in final government decisions [39,65].…”

“…In fact, many citizens' opinions, views, and feedback are been rarely considered in final government decisions [39,65]. Lack of government commitments raises citizen's suspicious that e-Participation initiatives might lead to nothing [49]. Rationally, citizens perceive that the benefits of their interaction with government through e-Participation initiatives are positively associated with the acceptance of such interaction.…”

A Knowledge Extraction and Management Component to Support Spontaneous Participation

“…However certain contemporary NER solutions apply lexical resources (e.g. WordNet 10 ), lexical patterns and statistics computed on large annotated corpus [32]. The common processing pipeline for NER includes detecting named entities, assigning a type weighted by a numeric confidence score and by providing a list of URIs for disambiguation.…”

E-Consultations: A Review of Current Practice and a Proposal for Opening Up the Process

“…In consequence, stakeholders seek more informal and direct relations with governmental agencies to foster better mutual understanding ( [16], p 48f.). Governmental agencies, on the other hand, have to design intensive communication strategies to get "users on board" the e-consultations ( [17], p. 61).…”