Public Participatory Decision Making

Within the realm of e-government, the development has moved towards testing new means for democratic decision-making, like e-panels, electronic discussion forums, and polls. Although such new developments seem promising, they are not problem-free, and the outcomes are seldom used in the subsequent formal political procedures. Nevertheless, more formalized process models offer a promising potential when it comes to structuring and supporting transparency of decision processes in order to facilitate the integration of the public into decision-making procedures in a reasonable and manageable way. This presentation presents an outline for an integrated framework for public decision making to: (a) provide tools for citizens to organize discussion and create opinions; (b) enable governments, authorities, and institutions to better analyse these opinions; and (c) enable governments to account for this information in planning and societal decision making by employing a process model for structured public decision making.