Mateja Kunstelj

Participatory policy process design: lessons learned from three European regions

Electronic Participation (eParticipation) generally refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance people’s activism and citizens’ involvement in public affairs—with a particular emphasis on legislation and policy-making—of modern democratic societies. Recently, the fastest growth of both ‘top-down’ (i.e. Government-driven) and ‘bottom-up’ (i.e. spontaneously emerging from the citizenry) eParticipation experiments in Western Europe and elsewhere, has inspired a number of interpretive frameworks, which have been developed by several leading scholars, such as Anttiroiko, Macintosh, Tambouris et al., Kalampokis et al., Aichholzer and Westholm, and Bicking and Wimmer, with the aim of scoping, characterizing and evaluating this relatively new phenomenon and its reported impact on civic engagement, as well as on Public Administration’s innovation. Besides the ritual wish to improve voter turnout and stimulate new forms of active citizenship through the diffusion of ICTs, a common feature of the above frameworks is that they all focus on Public Administration processes—in the legislative, administrative or policy-making domains—as the natural ‘loci’ of deployment and implementation of eParticipation methods and tools, also compared with more traditional (‘offline’) participation. The reason is quite straightforward: even in its bottom-up instantiations, eParticipation is always

Reference models for e-services integration based on life-events

Modelling life events is a task of a crucial importance and a first necessary step towards supporting resolution of a particular life event on the active e-government portal. The use of reference models as templates for building life-event models promises savings in time and costs of the modelling process. At the same time, using reference models can increase the quality and accuracy of the established models. The paper proposes a complete set of lifeevent reference models at different abstraction levels that allows for modelling and implementing virtually any life event. The types of reference models range from a general one that provides template for any life-event model, to reference models specialized for establishing models of a specific life event in a specific country or a region or tailored to a set of specific user circumstances and needs.