Ideas for a better place: e-participation tools supporting decision making process at the local level

E-participation in decision making is gaining ground. An increasing
number of administrations recently tries to promote interaction processes at
all levels of government. Starting from the successful experience of the
“ideario per Cagliari”, a crowd-sourcing tool that collected more than 500
ideas in few months for the strategic development of the city of Cagliari
(Sardinia), the authors present an overview of the work-in-progress on a series
of methods and tools to encourage participation and pursuing consensus,
in order to identify consistent policy choices for administrations. The
task of the paper is to test the usefulness and opportunities coming from a
mix of e-participation and “proactive” decision support tools and propose
an interactive and participatory policy-making process. We conclude that eparticipation
is extremely useful since it provides an administration with a
simple, immediate and free use of a pool of ideas and proposals previously
unimaginable. On the other hand, a tool for the structuration of the strategic
process in basic elements, goals and actions, is potentially useful for better
organizational planning: representation of ideas, clustering in strategic options,
and generation of sets of requirements on specific themes. They may
act as inputs for further discussion and successful implementation of community
development projects.