Monitoring, Coordinating and Promoting the European Union eParticipation Projects and Initiatives - The MOMENTUM Project

As they mature and become widespread, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play an important role in helping to address new challenges in involving citizens in decision-making, democratic or legislative processes, while also improving legislation. ICT research on eParticipation and eDemocracy in the European Union has made a significant contribution over the past years through more than 30 major European projects and national initiatives. Hence, it has paved the way for significant advances, and is already starting to transform governments and their services towards citizen participation.

 

In parallel, there is a great technological progress taking place in research projects in Europe and in the rest of the world; we are witnessing the emergence of powerful new ICT applications that will transform the way citizens, businesses and administrations interact and participate. Furthermore, and as social networking technologies are emerging as a powerful way of connecting citizens and businesses, dissemination and exploitation of the best practices among the stakeholders, are issues of strategic importance.

 

MOMENTUM project aims to monitor the existing and on coming eParticipation projects co-funded by European Commission, to consolidate their results and provide feedback to them and to the respective EC bodies and other designated stakeholders, advancing the high-level political and institutional engagement. Furthermore, MOMENTUM will also:

• Promote the output of European Union eParticipation projects and initiatives towards stakeholders in the various member states and internationally.
• Process and disseminate the results and achievements of the projects in a way that citizens can understand - further strengthening the public participation in electronic decision-making applications.
• Interact with the projects, utilising their already developed networking and knowledge management infrastructures.
• Become a connecting network, towards ideas, innovations and state of the art / state of practice examples concerning eParticipation advancements in Europe.

The project consortium consists of 5 partners from 4 different EU member states, bringing together the innovative know-how of academic and research institutions, the deployment capabilities of the IT industry and the administrative experience of highly specialized consulting firms.

Furthermore, the MOMENTUM team is reinforced by the presence of an independent Experts group, comprising of high-caliber international eParticipation and eGovernment experts from Europe and US. These experts will participate in events organised by the project where they will serve as invited speakers and at the same time during the relevant discussion sessions provide feedback on the project developments and results. The interaction with these external experts will also bring valuable know-how and best practices in the field of eparticipation to the eparticipation projects.