Impact

Formal results:

Phase 1: 2,074 contributions in 8 topics
Phase 2: 174 future concepts aggregated based on contributions out of phase 1
Phase 3: 2,578 questionnaires received (54,626 hits on single questions)

Impact:

The results of the project/procedure have been published at a press conference at the Austrian Parliament. Several members of the Parliament and of different Austrian political parties took part and received the results together background information on the method. The project took place directly after the Austrian national elections and was considered as a supportive information on youth topics for future political actions by the members of the parliament and of political parties.

The Austrian Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management, Mr Josef Proell, expressed in a press-release the importance of the results of "mitmachen.at" on environmental topics and their importance of future steps in this area. The topic “Environment” reached rank one in importance in participatory Phase 1 and 3.

All results of the project are published on the website www.mitmachen.at. Since the end of the project in February 2007 the results are permanently downloaded from the website. Several Austrian media organisations and youth-groups have actively presented the results to their target-groups.


Innovation:
The “3-step-model” provides the novelty of a citizen-centered approach of participation. The content of considerations in Phase 1 (Contributions or Deliberation) is citizen-produced and the concepts aggregated by experts are verified in Phase 3 by prioritisation through citizens. It represents a political decision-making-process with clear and applicable results. Furthermore this process has been evaluated three times in different sized projects with distinct content- and result-based expectations.

The project mitmachen.at represents the biggest effort made in e-democracy with a nationwide focus. It was also promoted internationally on the platform "Austrians abroad". Several scientific questions had to be evaluated in this project together with the scientific board. Firstly it was only promoted via email together with multipliers (Schools, Youth-Organisations, Public Employment Service Austria, and many more).

Further technology innovations took place, a statistic-linguistic software (for proto-semantic evaluation of contributions) was used by the commission-members in Phase 2, so it was possible to receive the first practical experiences with such technologies in an e-democracy-project in Austria.

Usability was a prerequisite for the project. The project-platform for mitmachen.at followed WAI-A and WAI-AA in great parts. Several security-functionalities, like the capture-software, averted WAI because of a necessary consideration between usability and security aspects.

Track record of sharing

Integral part of the procedure was the cooperation with the scientific board. This board had two main tasks, firstly the monitoring of the overall processes and secondly the preparation of a working paper about the project and the findings at the end of the project. These facts are basis of closer considerations of the e-democracy community in Austria as well as internationally.

Mitmachen.at is the latest procedure in the row of three realisations of the BRZ during the last 2 years. The insights of every procedure have influenced the following. Furthermore the COE invited the BRZ (Federal Computing Centre of Austria) to a symposium, where the underlying “3-Step-Model” was presented to European strategic decision-makers in this field – so ia good practice dissemination already took place in the international field.

Since the official end of mitmachen.at the interest on the procedure model increased remarkably. In the near future new procedures with other topics will take place.

Lessons learnt

1. Clear Input-Output-Outcome-factors and their communication is important.
A important fact in e-democracy is to provide detailed information on the framework of the procedure (costs, staff, timeframe,...) and to make the technology and policy easy to understand. Technology means the functionalities used in the project (incl. security, data-protection), policy states the rules of participation. The most important thing is to inform people what will happen with the results and what kind of influence will they have. Participants had the opportunity to comment on the project itself by stating their expectations and concerns. This also helped to gain information on acceptance.

2. Accessibility and usability are of utmost importance.
The cooperation with partners as multipliers was very important for promotion purposes of this nationwide procedure. Schools or other partners provided the infrastructure to participate in the procedure. Due to the fact that e-democracy has to be “inclusive”, it was very important to focus on usability aspects for this procedure.

3. Broader communication is necessary in nationwide procedures.
For procedures with a nationwide focus it is necessary to include more grassroots-marketing-efforts. This was an important finding of the scientific board whether email-promotion of the procedure is enough to activate the target group of the procedure.