Title: An investigation of the use of structured e-forum for enhancing e-participation in parliaments

Authors: Alexandros Xenakis, Euripidis Loukis

Addresses: Department of Psychology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. ' Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece

Abstract: The e-participation research has investigated and suggested some Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) tools such as e-forum, e-petition and e-community tools. This paper investigates the use of an advanced and more structured ICT tool, the |structured e-forum|, for supporting and enhancing e-participation and e-consultation in the legislation formation process in Parliaments. For this purpose, we designed and implemented an e-consultation pilot on a law under formation in the Greek Parliament, using a structured e-forum tool based on the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBISs) framework. This pilot has been evaluated using multiple methods (analysis of discussion tree, quantitative evaluation and qualitative evaluation).

Keywords: e-participation; e-consultation; structured e-forums; legislation formation; parliament; IBISs; issue-based information systems; multiple methods evaluation; electronic participation; online participation; Greece; electronic consultation; online consultation; ICT; electronic governance; e-governance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEG.2010.034092

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2010 Vol.3 No.2, pp.134 - 147

Received: 01 Jul 2009
Accepted: 22 Feb 2010
Published online: 12 Jul 2010 *

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