Demos@Work - Enable European-wide discussion on the harmful effects of smoking between elected representatives and civil society

Integrating already-created ICT-based eParticipation and eGovernment tools in a real-life implementation is the purpose of the Demos@Work Trial Project. The Demos@Work overarching objective is to facilitate European-wide discussion between elected representatives and civil society on emerging policy issues that have a potential impact on all countries within the European Union. The issue selected for this trial project is the harmful effects of smoking.

Therefore, the focus of this project is mainly on citizens and politicians. More specifically, the objectives of the project are to:address the issue of citizen disengagement from decision making processes, strengthen the EU fight against tobacco use, improve the quality of services provided to citizens, facilitate the work of MPs, accelerate transition to a knowledge society, increase the awareness of the Parliament activities among its citizens and leverage eRepresentative assets.

The platform will serve to improve the dialogue between regional/national-level elected representatives, the European parliament and citizens, while using and testing forms and methods of civic engagement. This will be achieved by configuring and putting into trial a secure, mobile environment through which elected representatives are able not only to engage with citizens on policy issues using a semantically enriched user-interface, but also to communicate and collaborate with their peers.

Demos@Work tool is an innovative Web 2.0 portal that will promote representative and transparent governance by granting the public access to policy-making proceedings through the use of ICT. The proposed technological platform will be created through the customization of two open source platforms that have already achieved international recognition and the support of the European Union (eRepresentative and Gov2DemOSS). In addition to this basic platform, other EC co-funded projects developments and results will be included to improve the platform capabilities, such as citizens’ engagement and feedback for politicians.