Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
5110652 | Government Information Quarterly | 2016 | 12 Pages |
Abstract
Despite over a decade-long experience of implementing e-Participation initiatives, there have been limited efforts so far to develop a detailed, comprehensive conceptualization for e-Participation considered from three distinct perspectives: as democratic process, a project and a deliberation platform. Current e-Participation literature is replete with fragmented models, which only partially describe aspects of e-Participation with main focus on structuring the “e-Participation” concept as a domain. This has made consistent descriptions and comparative analysis of e-Participation initiatives difficult, thus hindering the overall evolution of e-Participation. Consequently, no comprehensive, formal, executable e-Participation Ontology exists, that could be directly leveraged to facilitate operations of e-Participation initiatives or improving communication and knowledge exchange between similar e-Participation initiatives. In addition, current generation of e-Participation models does not explicitly support the emerging phenomenon of spontaneous, citizen-led e-Participation, in particular hosted on the social media platforms. This work bridges this gap by providing a practical, yet sufficiently detailed, conceptualization along with corresponding formal and executable ontology for next generation e-Participation. These semantic models cover the core facets of e-Participation - as a democratic process, an initiative and a sociotechnical system. The developed models also explicitly support the integrated citizen- and government-led model of e-Participation. For demonstration and validation, we employed the developed e-Participation Formal Ontology as a “design artefact” to describe two e-Participation initiatives at Local Government and European levels.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities
Business, Management and Accounting
Business, Management and Accounting (General)
Authors
Lukasz Porwol, Adegboyega Ojo, John G. Breslin,