Reusable tools for EU public participation

What is this action about?

Acquiring citizens’ opinions is a challenging task for many public administrations, which often lack the means to analyse large quantities of semi-structured or unstructured information. European institutions and Member States' public administrations have launched several initiatives to collect citizens' opinions when consulting stakeholders but these activities were mostly fragmented and had limited cross-organisational or cross-border cooperation.

Through the implementation of practical activities, this action wants to collect, enhance, consolidate and integrate existing stakeholder consultation and publish it as a reusable solution package.

Firstly, the action will focus on the identification of the requirements stemming from the public administrations in the different Member States. Secondly, the action will assess existing assets, reusable software solutions, standards and vocabularies that can address the identified needs. Finally, the identified solutions will be consolidated and generalised in order to allow them to be used in different business contexts that aim to address a common challenge.

By providing a toolbox for the collection of opinions from various digital sources in a standardised manner, the action will enable public administrations to manage open knowledge in a coherent way and extract meaningful knowledge that can help stakeholders and policymakers reshape decisions.

What are the objectives?

Consolidate and integrate existing reusable tools that allow the electronic participation of stakeholders, the analysis of the captured opinions and the discovery and generation of knowledge.

What are the benefits?

• The action will support public administrations to better address the expectations of their stakeholders.
• Citizens will increasingly be reached through e-participation and open knowledge sharing. This will ensure higher rates of collaboration as compared, for instance, to traditional expert consultations.
• Efficiency will increase by:
  
  • reducing time to make the right decisions;
  • getting the right knowledge/people as needed.
• There will be a major involvement of users working in administrations resulting in:
  
  • an increased generation of knowledge;
  • maximum reuse of the knowledge;
  • higher quality of the activities carried out through the sharing of the knowledge;
  • an easy clustering of the expertise of the users.
• Citizens and business will be able to voice their opinion, build consensus around their own ideas and influence the decisions of governments through a transparent process (supporting e-participation).

What has been achieved? 

The action has explored and assessed existing assets, reusable software solutions, standards and vocabularies that can address the identified needs. The identified reusable software solutions had been classified according to the type of participation platform that they belong to in order to make it easier for public administrations and Commission services to identify which reusable software might be relevant for them according to the type of challenge they wish to address.

The action delivered a number of software in two main streams:

• Extension of the participatory platform Futurium generalised and extended with functionalities such as more customisable workflows, group/community management, access rights as well as user experiences.
• Link to social media and other collaborative work environments in order to be able to explore different sources of information containing scientific evidence, users' perceptions, expectations and opinions.

Modular generic components such as:

• Components for sentiment analysis techniques in order to analyse the comments and co-created content posted by users on the platform and decide whether an input is pro or contra the topic/vision/idea discussed
• Components for data analytics, in order to be able to classify the different topics discussed and establish some figures about them such as: relevance, periodicity, degree of participation, activity etc.
• Components for data mining techniques to understand the correlations between variables, cluster data, detect hidden patterns in data, perform trend analysis, extract facts from evidence, link evidence to the other content types according to relevance, etc.