Beyond e-government:: Towards e-democracy

Democracy is the basis of our society. Its basis in freedom, fairness and equity has been cherished and fought for over the centuries. Now it faces a new challenge, a positive one. The growth of the Internet and pervasive telecommunications is promising an era of electronic democracy. We describe in this paper an architecture to distribute rationality, meaning facilitating the use of decision analysis methods, using the mechanisms of the web, to resolve political decision making. It is a tenet of ours that involving and communicating with the stakeholders at all stages of the process leads to better, more consensual decision making. The architecture allows for problem structuring, preference modelling, problem solving for each participant, negotiation and if no agreement is reached, voting.