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Part 2: eParticipation Implementations; International audience; Previous political sciences research has highlighted the importance of both ‘democracy’ (democratic processes and consultation with stakeholder groups) and ‘technocracy’ (specialized knowledge of experts) as main foundations for the development of effective public policies, and the need for balance as well as interaction between them. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for supporting this exchange can be highly beneficial. Our paper makes a contribution in this direction, by evaluating an ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method that has been developed for supporting the transfer of knowledge from ‘technocracy’ (i.e. knowledgeable experts) to ‘democracy’ (i.e. participants of the democratic processes, such as citizens’ representatives, elected officials and various public policies’ stakeholder groups). This method exploits policy-related content that has already been published by experts in numerous social media, adopting a selective approach (filtering this content in order to extract the highest quality parts of it that have been authored by the most knowledgeable experts) based on reputation management techniques. From the evaluation of this ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method useful conclusions have been drawn concerning its strengths and weaknesses, as well as directions for the improvement of it and the enhancement of its value.

Part 3: Policy Modeling and Policy Informatics; International audience; Predicting the outcome or the probability of winning a legal case has always been highly attractive in legal sciences and practice. Hardly any attempt has been made to predict the outcome of German cases, although prior court decisions become more and more important in various legal domains of Germany’s jurisdiction, e.g., tax law.This paper summarizes our research on training a machine learning classifier to determine likelihood ratios and thus predict the outcome of a restricted set of cases from Germany’s jurisdiction. Based on a data set of German tax law cases (44 285 documents from 1945 to 2016) we selected those cases which belong to an appeal decision (5 990 documents). We used the provided meta-data and natural language processing to extract 11 relevant features and trained a Naive Bayes classifier to predict whether an appeal is going to be successful or not.The evaluation (10-fold cross validation) on the data set has shown a performance regarding $$\text {F}_1$$-score between 0.53 and 0.58. This score indicates that there is room for improvement. We expect that the high relevancy for legal practice, the availability of data, and advance machine learning techniques will foster more research in this area.

Part 2: eParticipation Implementations; International audience; In Switzerland internet voting is currently being introduced in a piecemeal fashion. Since the first trials in 2003 an increasing number of Swiss cantons is offering the digital voting channel to its citizens either living in Switzerland or abroad. So far the question whether the introduction of internet voting in Switzerland would increase the digital divide, favoring the well educated, economically better off citizens could not be answered in a conclusive way. As yet bi- and multi-variate regression analyses of survey data showed that general trust in the internet and in internet voting in particular outweigh the effect of the typical digital divide variables. There is, however, so far no study trying to disentangle the two types of variables by applying structural equation modeling. In the present study we test whether digital divide variables have a direct effect on general support of internet voting in the Swiss population or whether they should rather be treated as exogenous variables of general trust in the Internet and of internet voting in particular. We therefore put forward a structural equation model which helps us to disentangle direct and indirect effects on internet voting affinity. In order to test our model we are using the first Swiss population survey exclusively conducted on the topic of internet voting in April 2016.

Part 2: eParticipation Implementations; International audience; International rankings of e-participation development provide useful information for making strategic decisions for a more successful information society development. However, when we start the interpretation of the ranking details, it is important to consider the context, as well as national factors and existed barriers on the way. The paper presents some results and conclusions drawn from the expert survey and aiming to detect the factors which affect e-participation development in Russia. The authors conducted an expert poll with the participation of 41 experts from government, business, NGO, scientific and education structures, and city-activists. The survey results allowed to detect the target of e-participation tools development in Russia; to determine the factors that influence positively and negatively on its development. The major finding of the survey showed the following trend: e-participation tools in Russia served to optimize the authorities’ work and fight such barriers as administrative, regulative and lack of citizens’ trust in e-participation tools.

Part 4: Critical Reflections; International audience; The question is whether citizens are sufficiently involved in the development of the facilities used to support e-Government, so they can safeguard the quality of these facilities. It is a relevant issue, as the projects in which these facilities are created often provide insufficient functionality. Based on a sample test, we selected evaluation reports of such projects and studied them based on a perceptual framework. It turns out that e-Government projects have been poorly evaluated and thereby governed. The evaluation governance instruments did not include any participative role of stakeholders. Principles of modern public administration theories are not sufficiently visible within the government in this regard. The quality can be improved substantially by involving representatives of industry and professional organizations, and by introducing co-creation before, during and after completion of projects, as well as during the corresponding evaluations and reflections.

Part 4: Critical Reflections; International audience; Innovation is a recurring theme in public administration. Governments around the world are always exploring innovation alternatives. However, the way public organizations innovate has evolved in the last few years from “in-house” innovation to open innovation. Although the literature is rich in references to innovation in the private sector, how open innovation processes can become a true and effective tool for governments is still an underexplored topic. The few studies that have tackled it have mainly addressed one main question: how can a successful private sector practice be introduced in public sector organizations? In contrast, this paper aims at making a contribution to the existing literature on open innovation in the public sector by addressing one issue that is key in open innovation processes: the role of intermediaries. Intermediaries are important actors in the open innovation ecosystem as they facilitate activities in all stages of the innovation process and help government agencies to achieve their goals.

Part 3: Policy Modeling and Policy Informatics; International audience; Societal challenges such as migration, poverty, and climate change can be considered ‘wicked problems’ for which no optimal solution exists. To address such problems, public administrations increasingly aim for data-driven policy making. Data-driven policy making aims to make optimal use of sensor data, and collaborate with citizens to co-create policy. However, few public administrations have realized this so far. Therefore, in this paper an approach for data-driven policy making is developed that can be used in the setting of a Policy Lab. A Policy Lab is an experimental environment in which stakeholders collaborate to develop and test policy. Based on literature, we first identify innovations in data-driven policy making. Subsequently, we map these innovations to the stages of the policy cycle. We found that most innovations are concerned with using new data sources in traditional statistics and that methodologies capturing the benefits of data-driven policy making are still under development. Further research should focus on policy experimentation while developing new methodologies for data-driven policy making at the same time.

Part 2: eParticipation Implementations; International audience; Municipal governments often struggle to inform and engage citizens around local issues. Due to complexities of local politics and the diverse expressions in public and private spheres, citizens face a huge information barrier towards meaningful participation. To overcome such barrier, we explore a solution to provide citizens with clear, useful, and trustworthy information. We describe a framework for accomplishing this goal through issue-based knowledge crystallization. In order to put this framework into test, we devised Community Issue Review (CIR) as a concrete process for crystallizing local political knowledge. CIR is a structured deliberative process that use a citizen panel to conduct analysis of data relevant to a pending issue. We describe CIR in three aspects of its functions: institutional design, deliberative process, and productive outcome. Three special characteristics of CIR are emphasized: (1) fully embedded within local decision-making context; (2) hybrid (face-to-face and online) deliberation; (3) facilitation on collaborative decision-analysis. We present the iterative design of the CIR process and the lessons learned from field practices in a local community.

Part 1: Methodological Issues in eParticipation; International audience; “Enabling Multichannel Participation through ICT Adaptations for Participatory Budgeting ICT-enabled platform” (EMPATIA) is a multi-channel participatory budgeting (PB) platform that represents a significant social innovation process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, involving citizens within complex public-institution structures. EMPATIA was targeted to deliver socio-economic and political benefits, such as enhancing citizen-government engagement, increasing public value through PB process, promoting ‘inclusiveness’ among the marginalized groups of citizens, and impeding political discontent that underpins distrust and scepticism towards the government. The attainment of these benefits will be driven by the EMPATIA’s performance. Hence, a performance measurement tools is needed to enable assessment of EMPATIA, empirically. With an aim to propose an integrated performance evaluation metrics, this study presents a set of assessment criteria for multi-channel digitally enabled PB service platforms – especially EMPATIA. Findings from a qualitative, multi-strategies research approach suggest that the metrics should include five key technical and non-technical performance indicators, to be used as the basis for the development of future evaluation instruments. Of major signposts, the metrics would inform key performance aspects to be considered during the PB platform development, and evaluated to indicate the PB platform performance.

Part 1: Theoretical Foundations; International audience; Employees demand high responsibility and empowerment, while keeping their work communal and flexible. Initiatives that foster organizational participation can contribute to the fulfilment of such work conditions. Research in sociology and psychology demonstrated positive effects on job satisfaction as well as productivity. However, although adoption of social software is widely spread in firms, research on the determinants of computer-supported organizational participation is scarce. We conduct 20 guided expert interviews to propose a research framework for computer-supported organizational participation. We describe the elements to consider when designing processes that aim to be beneficial for both the employer as well as the employees. Building on the expert interviews, our process model includes a topic horizon and a collaboration phase, which creates proposals that have to be decided on in order to produce results. We show how employee competence and leadership commitment are as important as the workload and supporting features as well as an option for anonymous communication. We propose a set of features and discuss implications for researchers and practitioners.

Part 3: Implementations; International audience; The paper presents the results of research on factors explaining the level of e-petitioning in Russian regions. The main goal is to reveal socio-economic, technological and institutional problems the regions face, and hence to embed the Russian case into the broad research agenda on online engagement. We concentrate on the federal e-petitions portal – Russian Public Initiative – and use the automated monitoring system to analyse subnational dynamics of online petitions submissions and voting on the aggregate level. The data are used to quantitatively assess the drivers and obstacles for e-participation. Our findings suggest that more active e-petition portal usage in regions is associated with higher socio-economic and technological development, as well as with democratic institutions and better e-government policy. One of the main obstacles to active use of the portal is its institutional design that at the moment provides regions with different opportunities and reinforces participation divides. Future steps, implications for automated monitoring system and some policy recommendations are also discussed.

Part 4: Policy Formulation and Modelling; International audience; The public sector gradually starts exploiting the crowdsourcing ideas initially developed in the private sector. However, there is much less knowledge on efficient and effective methods and practices for public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with private sector crowd-sourcing, so extensive research is required in this area. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an ICT-based method for ‘passive expert-sourcing’, with the latter term denoting the collection of policy relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts, which aims at supporting policy making by the European Union (EU) by leveraging its large policy community. Its theoretical foundation is previous theoretical work on the relationships between democracy and technocracy, and also on policy networks. The main technological pillars of the proposed method are: EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management, relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them. Finally, a first evaluation of the proposed method is presented, leading to encouraging results.

Part 3: Implementations; International audience; This paper reports results on presumably the first city-wide mobile participation trial (Living Lab) examining citizen participation in urban planning, conducted in Turku, Finland, in 2015. The questions examined are the socio-economic characteristics of the application users, as well as their motivations to participate. The inclusion of online participation has been discussed widely in literature on e-participation and the digital divide, arguing for a great influence of socio-economic factors, interest in the topic, and users’ online skills. The results reveal that this application, too, was used predominantly by young adults and middle-aged, highly educated, and technology savvy citizens, who were already interested in urban planning. Their use of the application was motivated primarily by the opportunity to bring their own ideas and issues to the city authorities’ attention, rather than participating in missions given by the municipality or discussing planning issues with fellow citizens, indicating a rather individualistic usage interest. The location-based features and ease of use of a mobile application were valued highly. Those who idled reported predominantly technical challenges with the app.

Part 1: Theoretical Foundations; International audience; The use of collaborative platforms and eParticipation has turned out to be a promising channel to integrate citizens and external experts in various scenarios. While initiatives from institutions like political parties, governments or municipalities have been the target of influential research, another public service, namely higher education, seem to run below radar level. In this paper we analyze the project “Tomorrow’s MBA” of the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and show through hands-on insights key success factors on how co-creation initiatives have to be designed in the field of higher education. The bottom-up strategy to create a new MBA program together with external stakeholders, students and the faculty delivers substantial results, which can be transferred to other fields within the public sector.

Part 1: Theoretical Foundations; International audience; E-participation projects are complex socio-technical constructs integrating different concepts such as participation techniques, stakeholders, objectives, information artefacts, and technical facilities. To conceptualise comprehensive solutions of e-participation projects in a holistic way – i.e. comprehensively integrating the different concepts forming an e-participation project–, enterprise architecture frameworks are increasingly studied. Effective use of enterprise architecture frameworks demands a comprehensive conceptualisation of e-participation projects, which should embark on a common metamodel. In this paper, we study existing conceptual models structuring the e-participation domain and metamodels of enterprise architecture frameworks. From the insights of the comparative analysis, the e-participation metamodel is developed using design science research. The metamodel provides the conceptualisation and taxonomy for an e-participation reference framework to develop comprehensive architectures in e-participation projects. It is presented in a UML 2.0 diagram and involves six viewpoints: Participation Scope, Participant Viewpoint, Participation Viewpoint, Data & Information Viewpoint, E-participation Viewpoint, and Implementation & Governance Viewpoint.

Part 2: Critical Reflections; International audience; This paper sets out to critically examine the mobilizing potential of e-participation. The extent to which citizens beyond the usual suspects are engaged is studied by way of survey data from two novel e-participation case studies: one Swedish, one Finnish. Besides from the traditional socio-demographic variables, the analyses highlights cultural attitudes and ask: Do e-participation processes succeed in mobilizing citizens dissatisfied with the way democracy works? Can e-participation bring critical citizens back in? Certainly, the empirical analysis indicates critical citizens are clearly overrepresented in these two cases.

Part 4: Policy Formulation and Modelling; International audience; Reliable and timely information about current economic and environmental conditions is crucial for policy makers to take decisions and for steering agents’ expectations formation about the state of the economy. While the usefulness of monitoring expectations, opinions and sentiments of economic agents is undoubted, one can argue that existing indices are based on a selected number of surveys and a low monitoring frequency resulting in a partial view of more complex dynamics. In this paper we present a web based tool based on the concept of Information Markets that can be used to aggregate expectations on policy indices and provide accurate and timely information to policy makers and policy modellers.

Part 2: Critical Reflections; International audience; The paper examines linkages between the type of the digital media resources that host internet discussions on publicly important issues and the outcomes of such debates viewed from the perspective of online deliberation theory and practice. The presented case-based study analyses seven online discourses that debated the destruction of western agricultural products imported to Russia after the embargo imposed by the Russian government on such food in August 2015. The study hypothesized that the digitally enabled discussions would be similar to face-to-face deliberation practices that tend to attract the like-minded people and thus reinforce the already established beliefs and worldviews among discourse participants. Specifically, it was assumed in this context that the attitude towards the policy of food destruction would differ across the media and depend on its public identity viewed from the perspective of political allegiance. The paper presents empirical evidence that supports – with some caution – the postulated assumption.

Part 2: Critical Reflections; International audience; With the growing utilization of “smart” technologies, social media and “Internet of Things” applications, citizen-government interactions are rapidly changing. These changes have substantially transformed participatory models where governments apply e-participation measures not necessarily for participatory goals. As cosmetic e-participation applications and mass online surveillance increase in scope, there is a critical need to re-assess the applicability of dominant frameworks of analysing participatory practices. The paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the role of the internet in citizen-government interactions in authoritarian contexts based on a critical assessment of dominant participation models. It first maps key analytical typologies and models of public participation based on an extensive literature review. This is intended to help identify potential models that explain public participation—or lack thereof—in authoritarian contexts. The outcomes of this review are (1) revealing a scholarly gap of substantial policy relevance on e-participation in authoritarian contexts, and (2) assessing the applicability of dominant e-participation analytical models in such contexts. The findings indicate that, in the digital era, the transformations in citizen-government interactions lack contemporary understanding. Based on this comparative review, an analytical framework is proposed which extends and adapts Arnstein’s ladder of participation to the digital era. The paper argues that the proposed model helps better understand emerging practices of citizen-government interaction, especially in authoritarian contexts, but also in some democratic contexts where e-participation measures are utilized for mass-surveillance or as political façade.

Social media is used by the majority of Swedish municipalities. However, the highly interactive features of social media are often not taken advantage of. The study aims to get a better understanding of why social media is not used to its full potential in the municipality. Findings from an interview study with communicators in three Swedish municipalities reveal that the motivation for using social media is often difficult to turn into action. Tensions emerging in the use of social media result in hesitation, uncertainty and a slowing down of work practice. The processes of managing the tensions are characterized by boundary crossing between different communities, such as municipal communicators, elected officials and citizens, with social media itself as an equally important actor. The processes of boundary crossing by the municipal communicators are discussed in terms of learning processes and new emerging competences that might redefine the role of the municipal communicator and hence perhaps the public servant in general. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016.

Part 4: Policy Formulation and Modelling; International audience; While the simulation-based impact assessment of public policy proposals allows policy makers to identify the feasible policy options and verify their economic, social and environmental impacts, it does not provide the explicit evaluation of policy options. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques can support an in-depth performance evaluation of policy options taking into account the preferences of decision makers and stakeholders. These preferences reflect acceptable trade-offs of performance among objectives. This study reviews multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) technique and presents a common policy appraisal format using main evaluation criteria linked to a set of measurable, context dependent attributes. We argue for a rank-based approach for eliciting preferences, select a novel method for attribute weight elicitation, and show how it can be integrated within a public policy multi-criteria evaluation framework. A use case for policymaking, ‘Ultra-Low Emission Vehicles (ULEV) Uptake in UK’, is used for demonstration of the proposed approach for policy decision analysis. This approach seeks to couple systems modelling and simulation of policy scenarios with MCDA, stakeholder analysis and preference elicitation. The outputs can further provide analytical insights in controversy/acceptability of policy options, and consequently guide further policy formulation and the design of better options.

Part 1: Theoretical Foundations; International audience; As a consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of Electronic Participation (e-Participation), current research on the field is fragmented and scattered. The exciting blurry boundaries and the immature identity of the field are making difficult the understanding of the main domain themes being investigated, in particular for “neophytes” researchers. In practice, several e-Participation initiatives often attract a wide audience but face serious limitations regarding involvement of those who attract. Recently, the potential of using social media to address citizens’ involvement deficit has been subject of academic debate. By consulting 44 e-Participation papers, considered highly relevant to the aforementioned challenges, this paper produces a general overview of e-Participation research, particularly through social media. The findings show that the e-Participation field still faces the challenge of identity and strive for gaining wider recognition as an independent research area. Concerning e-Participation through social media which seems to be partly overlooked in the field research, the politicians-citizen’s interaction has dominated scholars’ attention and the adoption of such initiatives sponsored and driven by governments are rarely examine. Based on the findings, several research suggestions, which could play a significant contribution to advance future e-Participation research, are proposed.

Part 3: Policy Consultations; International audience; Argument visualisation (AV) tools facilitate structured debates utilising elements such as issues, positions and arguments. In this way, AV tools seem promising for improving eParticipation e.g. by avoiding repetition and enhancing clarity in debates. In this paper we present and discuss citizens’ opinion on utilising an AV platform for eParticipation, specifically for discussing the emerging topic of environment and climate change. Results have been interesting; most users found the platform and topic interesting and understandable stating that they would use the platform again in the future and recommend it to other people. However, negative feedback has also been received, mostly in relation to things that frustrated users (e.g. the logic behind AV) and suggestions for improvement. As our evaluation is based on a mature AV tool and focuses on general aspects of such tools, we believe that results may be applicable to other AV platforms as well.

Part 4: Case Studies; International audience; This paper discusses the results of a survey on a concrete case of eParticipation, i.e. a campaign to get teenagers to participate in the Youth Council of the City of Lausanne. We analyse both the traditional tools (billboard ads, newspapers, official communication through schools) and the online tools (Web page, Facebook, YouTube). During our survey we used mixed methods: an online questionnaire (1360 respondents), documentary analysis of the Youth Council candidates’ application files, and interviews. We then analysed the impacts of the campaign in terms of participation under different angles, amongst other diffusion channels and use of humour.

Part 2: Reviews; International audience; Information and communication technologies have altered the relations between the political system and citizens. Policy-formulation is enhanced by e-consultations that extend the knowledge base and the legitimacy of policy-making. However, current e-consultation practice in the EU falls short of the potential. The paper proposes a deliberative turn, the use of special purpose technologies and the integration of social media discourse into the consultation process as means to further open it up and to strengthen the connection between government and citizens.

Part 3: Policy Consultations; International audience; PolicyCommons is a computer supported argument visualization tool to facilitate online deliberation on public policy. As such it supports the work of stakeholders by enabling them to navigate through arguments contained in relevant consultation and policy documents. These stakeholders include policy analysts, interest groups and the public. Specifically, PolicyCommons displays arguments about policies as browsable debate maps. Users can browse these debate maps and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents. Thus, PolicyCommons is designed to help users make sense of the range of publicly expressed opinions about public policies. The major challenges we face in using argument visualization tools for online consultations can be clustered around the four main concepts of transparency, sense-making, readability and scalability, in this paper we show how we are addressing these challenges.

Part 4: Case Studies; International audience; Participatory budgeting has become a popular application of e-participation in Germany. About one hundred local governments have executed participatory budgets in the last year. Citizen participation in public budget planning is not formally requested by law in Germany. Also, the legal procedures to settle the budget of a local governments are not defined in detail. In consequence, different procedures exist, which lead also to different implementations of procedures in participatory budgeting. In this contribution, process models for (participatory) budgeting are investigated and a reference process model for traditional budget planning and online participatory budgeting is developed. Reference process models support cities and municipalities to assess the added value and to estimate the human and financial resources to execute participatory budgeting. Hence, comprehensive reference process models are helpful instruments for local governments to decide whether to perform participatory budgeting or not. They are also contributing to successful e-participation endeavors by providing conceptual models (blueprints) for scoping the activities to engage with citizens from the beginning of planning till the evaluation of impact and outcomes.

Part 3: Policy Consultations; International audience; We are developing an eParticipation web platform based on Linked Open Data that targets regional communities in Japan. To increase transparency and public participation, we aim to utilize web contents related to target regions for sharing public concerns among citizens, government officials, and experts. We have designed a Linked Open Data set called SOCIA (Social Opinions and Concerns for Ideal Argumentation) to structure regional web contents (e.g. regional news articles, microblog posts, and minutes of city council meetings) and utilize them for eParticipation and concern assessment. The web contents are semi-automatically structured by our text mining system, Sophia, on the basis of regions and events extracted from news articles on the web. Minutes of city council meetings stored in SOCIA are annotated with discourse salience in order to visualize topic transitions in a meeting transcript. We also developed a prototype debate support system called citispe@k that uses SOCIA to help citizens share their concerns. Users can submit agendas, ideas, questions, and answers by referencing the structured regional information in SOCIA. Moreover, they can annotate SOCIA data with tags representing criteria for assessing concerns or utterance intentions.

Part 4: Case Studies; International audience; The paper reviews various eco-feedback systems including carbon calculators and discusses how different disciplinary approaches conceptualise and explain anticipated impacts of these systems. The European collaborative research project e2democracy investigates how citizen participation combined with long-term CO2 monitoring and feedback can contribute to achieve local climate targets. Empirical results from local climate initiatives in Austria, Germany and Spain show positive effects in terms of learning about CO2 impacts, increased awareness, enhanced efforts and guidance as well as individual empowerment leading to slightly reduced CO2 emissions. The findings highlight that a combined approach integrating eco-feedback and (e )participation is promising to foster sustainability.

Part 1: Keynote Speech; International audience; As democracy goes through various crisis and citizens increasingly disengage with traditional party politics, extra-parliamentarian, alternative modes of democratic politics emerge on many fronts; manifesting a development towards what is called counter-democracy. Debates on the role of the internet in democracy have been with us since its inception; today the discussions focus on social media, which have quickly emerged as public sphere sites and tools for democratic participation. My argument rests on the notion of contingency: the factors that make a phenomenon possible but also that delimit it. In this presentation I look at some key contingencies of political economy, technology, and socio-cultural patterns and how they impact on the spaces of online participation and the forms of identity that they foster. In particular I note the emergence of what I call the solo sphere as a mode of participation that has debilitating consequences for alternative politics.

Part 5: Techniques and Analysis; International audience; The emergence of web 2.0 social media enables the gradual emergence of a second generation of e-participation characterized by more citizens’ control, in which government agencies post content (e.g. short or longer text, images, video) to various social media and then analyze citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes/dislikes, comments, etc.). In this paper we propose an even more citizens controlled third generation of e-participation exploiting web 2.0 social media as well, but in a different manner. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large set of web 2.0 sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings. This content undergoes advanced processing in order to extract from it arguments, opinions, issues and proposals on the particular policy, identify their sentiments (positive or negative), and finally summarize and visualize them. This approach allows the exploitation of the vast amount of user-generated content created in numerous web 2.0 social media for supporting governments to understand better the needs, wishes and beliefs of citizens, and create better and more socially rooted policies.

Part 5: Techniques and Analysis; International audience; Policy decisions in governmental models are often based on their perception and acceptance in the general public. Traditional methods for harvesting opinions like telephone or street surveys are time intensive and costly and direct interaction between a governmental member and the population is limited. Social media harbor the chance to easily get a high number of opinions and proposals in form of poll participation or interactive debate contributions.Especially debates about political topics can generate data which are hard to interpret because of its length and complexity. We propose a collection of methods to support a decision maker in gaining an overview over textual debates coming from several social media to save time and effort in manual analysis. Our approach enables an efficient decision making process by a combination of automatic topic clustering, sentiment analysis, filtering, and search functionalities aggregated in a graphical user interface. We present an implementation and a use case proving the usefulness of the proposed methodologies.

Part 5: Techniques and Analysis; International audience; When building an eParticipation environment, many questions arise. Who will the participants be? What are the outcomes? How will citizens interact? How will they be selected? All these questions will influence the specification of an eParticipation environment. In order to create an effective eParticipation environment, the designer pays attention to all these characteristics, which can be tricky, especially when selecting ICTs to support the eParticipation process. This paper suggests the use of an ontological approach when specifying these eParticipation environments, in order to reduce the designer’s cognitive efforts when designing effective eParticipation environments.

Part 2: Critical Reflections; International audience; Estonia has acquired the reputation of a successful e-voting country, and perhaps justifiably so. It was the first country in the world to enable remote online voting in nationwide elections in 2005 and the share of e-voters has been on a rise ever since, now reaching one-third of all voters. Against this backdrop of a seemingly flourishing e-democracy, we set out to ask if the country’s success in e-voting also implies its success in e-democracy in a broader sense. In a qualitative case study, we compare Estonia’s experience in e-voting with the implementation and outcomes of three e-participation projects to demonstrate that considerable discrepancies exist between the take-up and perceived success of e-voting vis-à-vis other e-democracy instruments. In light of these findings the paper further discusses the factors that are likely to account for these differences and highlights the need to look beyond the success of online voting for a holistic evaluation of the state of e-democracy in a given country.