A Framework for Assessing eParticipation Projects and Tools

An increasing number of governments worldwide understand the importance of electronic participation (eParticipation) i.e. the importance of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to more actively engage citizens in democratic processes. As a result, the number of eParticipation projects and relevant tools is rapidly growing. This makes the need for recording and reviewing such projects and tools both timely and critical. In this paper we present a framework for assessing eParticipation projects and tools. The proposed framework is based on distinguishing between participation areas and ICT support for these areas and suggests assessment to be performed using specific templates that are developed for this purpose. We further apply this framework in order to assess 19 relevant European Commission co-funded research projects. The preliminary results suggest that research in the domain of eParticipation is at its early stages. More specifically, the results suggest that projects focus on the more elementary eParticipation areas, such as information provision and opinion polling, while there is a trend for using multiple access channels, e.g. mobile technologies