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The Swedish city of Örebro has since long faced complex problems with poor water quality in a local river. This problem is a typical example of a regional decision problem, since there are several different stakeholders that might be affected, and there are different views on the need for, and effect of, different measures. The problems also strongly relate to the environmental condition of the river...
This chapter provides an overview of the main participatory budget practices in Europe, together with a description of the pioneer one of Porto Alegre, as many of them are based on it. We also present an architecture for e-participatory budget formation support. Finally, an experiment is carried out to illustrate the architecture.
Pilot projects in the area of remote Internet voting have been carried out in several countries. However, legally binding Internet-cast voting is valid in few countries, Estonia being the first country to introduce it at national level. A good communications infrastructure, voters’ high e-readiness, the widespread use of the national e-ID card, which enables secure authentication of on-line voters,...
This chapter presents a case of “real participation” which happened in The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, Germany. When the city government felt that the largest public swimming pool, the Stadionbad, needed renewal and different proposals for the future design were made, they decided to open a public consultation. City Government and the City Parliament, who has the final budget authority, committed...
This chapter provides an overview of potential topics of interest within the fields of e-democracy and e-participation from a group decision and negotiation perspective, setting up a potential research and practice agenda.
The pressures towards e-government have brought the possibility to use decision-analytic methods and models to support the participation of social actors in democratic deliberations about public issues. Despite their increased use, however, less attention has been devoted to the process of structuring issues prior to building them in such participatory contexts. In this chapter, we examine the role...
‘Decision support systems (DSS)’ is a well-used term but one that is often used glibly without care for the type of the decision supported and the level of support the system offers. We begin by discussing a classification of DSS according to these two dimensions, i.e., decision type and the level of support. For the former, we use the Cynefin framework, which divides decision contexts into four spaces:...
e-Democracy essentially refers to involving groups of citizens in public policy decision making through electronic means. This may be done by implementing standard political approaches based on debating and voting or through a more analytically oriented perspective. In this chapter, we review key approaches to group decision support assuming that participants adopt a decision-analytic style...
The theory of voting has a long and discontinuous history. Currently the theory takes individual preference rankings over alternatives as given and establishes results involving compatibility or incompatibility of various desiderata concerning ways to aggregate individual rankings into social choices or rankings. From the viewpoint of democracy, some of those desiderata are more important than others...
In this chapter, we present a proposal for decision aiding in a participatory situation in the real world may constitute, in particular for water management. We first outline the context in which these decision-aiding processes take place: messy inter-organizational settings. We then present some of the available decision-aiding theories and models that could be used and adapt one of these, a decision-aiding...
This chapter provides an overview of the fields of e-participation and e-democracy and set them up in the context of group decisions and negotiations. It provides also a broad overview for the rest of the book, introducing the forthcoming chapters.
This chapter reviews key concepts in democratic theory and participation from a classical liberal perspective, so as to set up the stage for the rest of the book. After revising various definitions about democracy, we review the main ideas about direct democracy, representative democracy and participatory democracy. We then address some of the current challenges for democracy, outlining how information...
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