White Paper: Brief overview of current practices for open consultation

The purpose of this document is to provide a brief overview of open consultation approaches in the current, international setting and propose a role for Information Technologies (IT) as a disruptive force in this setting. The document is structured as follows. We describe the motivation behind this work in Section 1.1; we identify trends and challenges in Section 1.2. Then, we look deeper into the first stages of public consultation in Section 2, referring to current practices across the globe. We conclude the text with a summary of the findings and proposed next steps in Section 3.

The public consultation process in Greece faces many issues: research showed that although people find it very valuable, trust towards the process is low and citizen participation has been declining. OGP commitments to strengthen the public consultations were clear, and progress has been made but technical progress in the implementation has been slow.

SciFY has worked towards facing the above challenges through e-democracy tools. In order to best understand the international scenery and adapt our approach, we conducted a study of current open consultation practices, which we share in this document, as part of our open knowledge dissemination action.

The results of this study empowered the creation of a innovative, even disruptive, tool: DemocracIT. DemocracIT , is an innovative public consultations platform that allows policymakers engage with citizens at the final stage of the consultation process in an effective way. With DemocracIT we respond to the need for more transparency, higher citizen participation and clearer impact measurement. Its open source approach maximizes reuse potential and, thus, may empower communities beyond the traditional law-making ones, including possibly cross-country policy making organizations and settings. The open source approach allows for adaptability, customization, and therefore international use.

Citizen engagement in the decision-making process has significantly increased during the last two decades [1] . A number of reasons can explain this trend: the complexity of the issues to be solved, the knowledge citizens and citizen groups possess around a problem, the need for acceptance of the policies to be implemented. But it is emerging ICT technologies, Internet usage and web 2.0 tools that are the technical enablers, since they have made wider citizen participation easier. Yet, our research around practices and tools used for public consultation, a function that permeates all the stages of the policy making cycle, shows that a number of challenges still need to be addressed:

-Inadequate use of ICT technologies. Public consultation practices require that policymakers deal with large amounts of textual input. Although ICT technologies (e.g. text mining, sentiment analysis) exist, they are not exploited to allow for an effective analysis of the available citizen feedback, making the work of the policymakers more difficult.

-Public consultation of the final draft laws is a real need, yet the approach is inadequate: at this stage, the only way citizens can leave their comments is through e-mails and forms. This approach is ineffective in many ways: it does not allow discussion, interaction and mutual understanding, nor does it encourage participation.

-Lack of an evaluation mechanism for the consultation process: There is no way for the citizens to check what their contributions were, and if and how they got into consideration or incorporated in the final text of the law. This increases the lack of trust of the public on the outcome of e-participation processes The policymaking process includes different steps that could be broadly described as follows:

-Issue identification / Agenda setting -Policy formulation -Decision making -Implementation -Evaluation Yet, the above stages are indicative; the lawmaking process is usually iterative and more systemic. Consultation can permeate the entire process, to maximally integrate feedback and improve the resulting policies.

We looked into practices of different governmental structures regarding the first three steps of the policymaking process. For these different stages, different e-participation tools are being used.

There is a variety of tools and methods to gather feedback for the first stages of the lawmaking process. For example, the NOMAD platform [6] allows a policy maker to gather feedback from the Web and Social Media to improve a policy proposal. The PADGETS system [7] supports policy makers by combining social media analysis and simulation to provide feedback on policy making. However, as indicated above the use of technology is very limited in the public consultation of the final text versions of the draft law. Furthermore, in most cases the tools function as collectors of data and do not always empower the citizen; they empower the policy maker.

Yet, the need for a system that enables citizens and lawmakers to interact efficiently

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