Overall, the project is very well and highly professionally formulated. It certainly does address the issues raised in the Work Programme. It embarks on a complex and challenging task of developing a new digital platform to enable co-creation and co-production of citizen-centered service. The project’s strong point is in going beyond the creation of a mere digital platforms (one among many others) but to build on that basis an ecosystem of public engagement. This is a challenging task. The platform itself will consist of the already existing - and tried in real-life - components (applications). The project claims to break ‘…new ground by employing digital technologies as a game-changer in the relationship between citizens and government’ (as stated in D2.2 in Exec Summary on page 6). This is a serious claim that spans well above the public sector modernization problematics alone and touches upon a spectrum of broader issues of democratic participation, civic activism, public trust. Deliverable 1.1 (Consolidated conceptual & methodological framework) explains in detail each of the established components and the way they will be mutually integrated and also connected to other (external) sources and data (e.g. social networks). Also, in D2.2 (page 10) it is said that WeGovNow has the objective to augment existing eGovernment solutions. However, despite knowing the performance of each component, the performance of the entire platform/ecosystem is described rather sketchy and generically (page 35 of D1.1) which does not allow a reader to assess the augmentation outcome. In this light, it seems that the consortium should have been able to formulate and define performance related indicators/parameters taking a proper account of the known performance of each application and extend such analysis to estimate the performance of the entire ecosystem by specifying the integration effects and impacts. One would assume that the selected and thoroughly analyzed use cases and stories should give confidence to make such estimation and model the performance parameters. It is advised that the consortium does so by updating this deliverable or addresses the performance issue in greater detail in other related deliverables before the platform’s prototype is developed and tested. Greater clarity about the planned performance would also help monitor the project success in general (e.g. making corrections promptly and timely) and report on the expected impacts more convincingly.

The consortium could have made a stronger effort and foresee the potential audience size. Without such estimates the public value and impact of the platform’s prototype remain unclear. How the platform's scalability could be ensured if only a prototype is expected to be developed? A stand-alone deliverable might be needed to describe how such scalability can be achieved given a limited scale of the pilot. It is recommended that dissemination and exploitation activities are linked with the public value the project is going to generate as a citizen engagement ecosystem. While the use cases and scenarios are credible and interesting, these are rather generic and lack important factual detail to understand the potential for scalability and adoption by end-users (what if they won’t like to be locked in in one approach, design, platform, interface?). Presenting personal profiles of potential users is interesting at first sight but it is not clear how representative these cases (it is assumed that the target audiences will be far more heterogeneous and complex). Are the users’ real names that important? Another unanswered question (pertinent to D5.1) is how the project is going to assess the success of its outreach and communication activities on the Internet, for there is no clearly stated approach to use some standard sets of web analytics to measure audience response?

At the end of the day, the project outcomes should convince that both technological and organizational innovations are achieved and supported with credible evidence. In this context, the last sentence of the Executive Summary of D2.2 states that ‘technology innovation and organisational process innovation must be pursued at the same time’ needs better clarification and argumentation as these two processes are not necessarily evolve in parallel and there might be risks involved assuming that this is the case (what if first technology innovation occurs outside the public sector while organizational changes are typically slower in government to its inertia?). The consortium may consider different scenarios and assess how to manage potential risks when the paces of organizational and technological innovations differ. That might directly influence the project expected impacts and have impacts on democratic practices and participation as well, since project’s strategic objective is to change the way governments collaborate with citizens. The project considers the latter as customers (e.g. as stated in the last sentence of section 2.1.1 of D2.1) - as usually the private sector entities do - while a good practice (e.g. promoted by OECD) is to view citizens as equal partners rather than clients, especially in the co-creation process. If the claim to shift power from public administration to citizens is to be realized, describing citizens as ‘customers’ might be a serious limitation. The forthcoming deliverables should be more clear on the approach applied towards citizens and explain the project impacts on broader issues of democratic governance. Especially, stronger effort is needed to determine specific public (democratic) values and related impacts the new ecosystem is going to generate.
Another issue that might need closer scrutiny is to provide more convincing reasoning why only a prototype is planned to be created given that all the components are the already and actually functioning applications? Could, in this light, the scale of the trials be expanded more substantially to resemble real-life circumstances? While there is no doubt that the prototype will be functioning, still there are unanswered questions whether the prototype would withstand the reality check? Also, it would be difficult to prove whether the platform and related services would be accepted and actually used on a wider scale? Why citizens would prefer this particular platform over other services? Whereas having even a working prototype will be a significant achievement in its own right, that might not be a sufficient proof to support the claim that the project has broken new ground both in terms of technological breakthrough and organizational innovation as stated in the project description. It is therefore suggested to address this issues early on as the project is in its active implementation phase.