LexiPation - An advanced ICT Tool for enhancing Citizen’s Participation in the Legislative Process

One major objective of i2010 eGovernment Action Plan¹ is to strengthen citizens’ participation and democratic decision-making in Europe, by "demonstrating tools for effective public debate and participation".

In this project, an integrated ICT platform will be deployed and tested, to conduct moderated online discourses on legislative proposals, involving policy makers, citizens and other socio-economic groups in the four selected testbeds of Hamburg (Germany), Thessaloniki (Greece), Massa (Italy) and Alston (UK).

The platform will make use of the Living Labs methodology, a user-centric approach for co-creative design and validation of IT products and services recently developed with great success at EU level² , and which will prove useful to overcome the potential conflict between "representative" and "deliberative" democracy, enabling interested stakeholders to express a timely, informed and responsible judgement at each of the following stages of the legislative process:

1. policy formation (agenda setting and prior analysis);
2. discussion of draft legislation;
3. implementation of legislation;
4. amendments and follow-up. 

More specifically, LexiPation will support:

• the migration towards (and diffusion of) a participatory legislative process, by the reduction in complexity of its current workflow, through the application of content management and e-collaboration techniques during the preparation and discussion of legislative drafts; 
• the empowerment of citizens and organised groups of interest, being allowed to the visualisation of arguments, antecedents and potential impacts of a new legislation and the possibility to propose amendments to the existing one; 
• the validation of e-Democracy practices and mechanisms at four different levels of Europe’s public administration, i.e. small (Alston) and medium (Massa) municipalities, prefectures (Thessaloniki) and city states (Hamburg).