Federated eParticipation Systems for Cross-Societal Deliberation

Acronym of the case:

FEED

Web address of the case:

http://www.feed-project.eu

Country of the case:

Czech Republic , Greece , Netherlands , Slovakia , United Kingdom

Posting Date:

13 November 2009

Last Edited Date:

16 November 2009

Author:

Spyros Passas (National Technical University of Athens)

eParticipation | egovernment | Energy and Environment

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

The main objective of FEED is to apply a new concept in e-Participation by allowing users to have seamless access to existing federated content that matches their needs for information supporting the several aspects of a public deliberation, when focusing on Environmental and Energy issues. Through FEED, existing federated content and/or other knowledge material (some of it already under processing also by other current eParticipation projects), are contextually annotated or channeled according to the issue and deliberation process specifics, allowing in this way, the platform users to perceive, search for and retrieve it in the context of a participative e-activity.

In particular FEED focuses on improving the quality of implementation of European legal acts and fostering interaction for more meaningful information flows between the regional/local government and citizens. Specifically with the use of the state of the art ICT tools, providing functionalities such as metadata mapping and search and retrieval of interrelated content, FEED will support public debates on a series of issues that stem from European legal acts (Directives, Decisions, etc). Such issues may constitute zoning, environmental permits, energy, and/or others and drive the policy making agendas of regional/local government - the final set of issues and deliberation processes to be incorporated into the FEED pilot will be decided in the initial stage of the project in the corresponding work package. In this respect the FEED trial will tackle both the social and IT challenges for achieving cross societal deliberation on common issues based on state of the art technological paradigms for content federation.

FEED constitutes a Citizen-Driven trial project that provides the corresponding tools and engages a critical mass of public involvement in the initial stages of the legislative process, taking into consideration also any internal sub-stages that the deliberation procedure may introduce while exploiting the on going results from other, pilot eParticipation Legislation-oriented projects run by members of the FEED Consortium. Specifically FEED focuses on:

Empowering the legislation proposal formation stage, driven by the decision makers' need to scan the overall environment where the proposed legislation is going to act upon and identify early any social problems and need, and/or establish the background for a policy or a change in a policy. In this process, the project aims at making available relevant content, that will be managed in a federated environment of information sources - some of them also stemming from projects like LEX-IS, LEGESE, SEAL, DEMO-Net where project partners already participate.

Supporting the debate on a municipal level but with a truly Pan-European orientation, which engages a critical mass of participants in (a) gathering evidence, knowledge and supporting information from a range of sources, including citizens, businesses, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and other socio-economic organizations, (b) presenting and understanding context, (c) designing the appropriate public policies for managing the problems that meet the needs of the involved parties, including the political context and (d) developing and concluding upon a range of options.

Targeting the legislative and policy issues of Energy and Environment, allowing for verticalisation and real solution-oriented application of existing tools, capitalising on already gained experience and guided by high-caliber experts present in the FEED team.

Testing in practice novel approaches for user involvement, including content federation, Web 2.0 and social networking techniques, context-driven semantic annotation tools, multiple channel interaction paradigms and trust building approaches.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Sector

Environment | Local/Regional Community Development | Water

Date

January 2008 to December 2009

Target Users

Target Users Description

FEED aims at engaging the key stakeholders ("actual players") in the deliberation process that takes place during the two initial stages of the legislative process, specifically decision-makers, experts on e-Participation, Environmental and Energy issues, government officials, citizens, businesses, NGOs and youth. For the FEED trials these stakeholders will be represented by members of the project consortium along with a considerable mass of public involvement by an associated Cluster of End-User Cities that spans four different European countries. Specifically the FEED consortium has contacted and taken the consent of several municipalities with strong Environmental and Energy considerations which, along with the help of the consortium technical, environmental and energy experts, will pilot the platform in real life issues that determine their policy making agendas. FEED pilots will comprise:

External non governmental organisations and municipal agencies
Decision makers and employees in municipalities
Businesses and Citizens

Scope

Cross-border | Local (city or municipality) | National | Regional (sub-national)

Status

Pilot

Language(s)

Czech | Dutch | English | Greek | Slovak

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The project is in line with the i2010 strategy which was launched to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries, to make a major contribution to the Lisbon Agenda and other European Community policies19. More specifically, the overarching aim of the i2010 initiative is to ensure that Europe's businesses, governments and citizens make the best use of ICT in order to improve industrial competitiveness, support growth and the creation of jobs, as well as to address key societal challenges.

In this context, FEED seeks to use ICT tools and applications in order to enhance democratic processes by:

changing the way policy-makers in energy and environmental issues interact with Citizens
improving the decision-making process and its outcomes
enhancing the participation of the public in the decision-making process amongst others through improved interaction with decision-makers

Additionally to supporting regional/local policy making FEED also aspires to contribute to EU policy making. To this direction FEED can hold specific (thematic) debates in local, cross-societal, scope about issues that relate directly to the work of EU level policy making groups and retro-feed them with real life representative results. Indicatively, FEED contribution to EU-level policy and legislation / standardization process targets:

The thematic sectors and corresponding open consultation in the "Energy for a Changing World" as seen in the website of the Directorate-General for Energy and Transport20.
The European Standardisation for Legal documents and their exchange, through the CEN/ISSS Workshop on an Open XML interchange format for legal documents - (WS/METALEX)

The project thus contributes to the i2010 eGovernment Action Plan major objectives21 aimed at:

No citizen left behind: advancing inclusion through eGovernment so that by 2010 all citizens benefit from trusted, innovative services and easy access for all;
Making efficiency and effectiveness a reality - significantly contributing, by 2010, to high user satisfaction, transparency and accountability, a lighter administrative burden and efficiency gains;
Implementing high-impact key services for citizens and businesses - by 2010, 100% of public procurement will be available electronically, with 50% actual usage, with agreement on cooperation on further high-impact online citizen services;
Putting key enablers in place - enabling citizens and businesses to benefit, by 2010, from convenient, secure and interoperable authenticated access across Europe to public services;
Strengthening participation and democratic decision-making - demonstrating, by 2010, tools for effective public debate and participation in democratic decision-making.

In this context, FEED will foster the use and support of ICT technologies for the creation of a better regulatory framework. FEED foresees a broad use of ICT tools for democracy purposes and specifically for on-line engagement of the citizens, businesses, NGOs and the state to energy and environmental issues.

Consequently the use of the technology may result in more democratic legislation and policy making based on the decision making procedure promoted by FEED.

The active involvement of citizens in the decision making procedure is envisaged and encouraged within the FEED framework. Therefore, the European citizenship is strengthened through Citizens involvement in EU level decisions.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Participation

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Mainly (or only) open standards

Funding source

Public funding EU

Implementation and Management Approach

The system will be brought from the conceptual phase of methodologies, semantic models and individual components and to a fully integrated e-Participation platform through the following implementation roadmap:

STEP I

In step 1 the community of potential users of an e-Participation platform - i.e. citizens, businesses, NGOs, socio-economic groups, government officials, and decision-makers at any level - will be categorized to discrete user groups with specific characteristics and requirements for the system.

In parallel a set of pre-defined models that the consortium is already acquainted with through its experience in other projects (LEXIS, SEAL, LEGESE) will be enriched and refined where necessary according to the various sets of existing requirements - i.e. user needs, legislative process stages and sub-stages for Environmental and Energy deliberation, structure of EU and national legislation, etc - in order to constitute a semantically annotated repository of models that will enable the system's operation.

Â STEP II

In this stage the existing software tools that the consortium members have already developed will be integrated with the semantic models of the previous step to produce an e-Participation environment providing the necessary services for posting issues to be deliberated, interrelating them with existing content, retrieving content, adding informative material, stating opinions, retrieving posed opinions and monitoring the entire procedure.

Â STEP III

In this final stage the integrated e-Participation platform of the previous stage will be put through a rigorous period of pilot operation where all its features and capabilities will be tested and evaluated in a pragmatic environment of real life events. The objective is to assess the platform's ability to effectively support participation in the deliberation process of real life environmental and energy issues of the policy agendas of the 8 Municipalities that constitute the FEED Cluster of End-Users Cities. The outcome after the application of the necessary modifications will be the final FEED e-Participation platform for CrossFEED Societal Environmental and Energy Deliberation.

Technology solution

The system architecture's objective is to bring together a number of pre-existing components (primarily software infrastructures) along with a couple of component (mainly ontologies) that are being developed during the project. According to the system architectures, FEED is decomposes to the following (conceptual) segments:

Content (Federated) which comprises the Managed Content (GIS Data, Documents and Media content) and the Web Content that is Validated Content that is found in web databases (e.g. Eur-Lex and Google News) and Invalidated Content that is found dispersed over the internet

Regarding the Managed Content, the main subsystems that store and retrieve this content are already existing components that are provided by the consortium partners, ATC's document management system, Public-I's webcasting platform and Flevoland's Google Maps Infrastructure. Ontology Space, that incorporates the necessary ontologies determine the semantic capabilities of the system. In particular, the Deliberation Ontology provides a "grammar" for defining different types of deliberation. Based on the Deliberation Ontology, different deliberation models are specified according to the needs of every pilot site that are followed by the system during its trial operation. The Domain Ontology the "things" a deliberation process can be about. Practically the Domain Ontology provides an advanced keyword index to every data source (mainly managed content data source) that the system is referencing.

Presentation Layer, which is basically the system web frond end for its human end users. The Presentation Layer incorporates a number of Participatory Tools, such as Forums, Petitions, Meetings Calendar, Webcast/media Player and Map Viewers that help end users both to access the content and also express their opinion during a deliberation process. Furthermore the Presentation Layer incorporates also a Search facility that allows end users to access all categories of Federated Content. The provided search capabilities will either be free-text search and/or search by deliberation type or ontology term.

Most of the modules developed for the FEED platform are using open source technologies, which is also a basic scope of the project.

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