DEMOS@WORK: Enable European-wide discussion between elected representatives and civil society.
The Demos@Work overarching objective is to facilitate European-wide discussion between elected representatives and civil society on emerging policy issues that have a potential impact on all countries within the European Union. The issue selected for this trial project is in the field of public health, more specifically, the harmful effects of smoking. Nevertheless, more policy areas/ topics will be explored, such as communication/ EU policy.
This will be achieved by configuring and putting into trial a secure, mobile environment through which elected representatives are able not only to engage with citizens on policy issues using a semantically enriched user-interface, but also to communicate and collaborate with their peers. Therefore, the focus of this project is mainly on citizens and politicians.
The project brings together three technical partners, two end-users and an academic institution with considerable expertise in developing and applying eDemocracy and eGovernment solutions at local, regional and national levels of government:
GFI acts as Project Manager and will provide the knowledge related to semantic technologies. GFI has worked in the semantic interoperability environment in the eGovernment TerreGov project (FP6).
Gov2u provides the Gov2DemoSS citizen online participation platform which has been awarded with the EU Good Practice Label for the project. Gov2u is a partner in the eRepresentative project for which it has developed modules such as committee event notifications, secure discussion spaces and remote e-polling for committees.
Scytl will be responsible for the integration and customization of the technological platform to be used in trials. Scytl is an EU ICT Prize recipient and is a partner in the eRepresentative project. They have implemented several e-Participation projects in Spain.
NTUA has worked in modules such as the Legislative Process workflow model, the Ontology for legal Framework Modeling and the XML descriptions of legal documents.
Parliament of Catalonia will be one of the project’s end-users. This Regional Parliament has previous experience in using e-Democracy tools and is a partner in the eRepresentative project.
Parliament of Lithuania will be the project’s other end-user. This National Parliament is a partner in the eRepresentative project.
Combining modules and experience gained in all the aforementioned projects under one platform will provide a state-of-art solution for enhancing eParticipation.
