Discursive E-Democracy Support - CiteSeerX

Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006

Discursive e-Democracy Support Rui Pedro Lourenço INESC Coimbra Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra Portugal [email protected]

João Paulo Costa INESC Coimbra Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra Portugal [email protected]

Abstract The expression ‘public participation’ in democratic decision-making processes may assume different meanings ranging from “the right to be informed” up to “the right to directly decide”. An interesting approach to understand how citizens may influence these processes is provided by John Dryzek’s account for discursive democracy, a particular strand of deliberative democracy. His approach deemphasizes the role of voting mechanisms as a way to influence administrative power and favors instead deliberation within the public sphere. Early bourgeois European public sphere would comprise conversation in meeting places, debates on the newspapers, and political association. The Internet plays an important role on today’s public sphere but, in our view, still lacks the necessary tools to promote the creation of ‘constellations of discourses’ and support citizen’s deliberation on them. We propose to structure public participation as a collaborative writing effort, producing agreed documents reflecting different discourses used to influence public decision processes.

1. Introduction Despite the fact that no particular democratic system is confined to a single theoretical model (they all incorporate characteristics from different models), the liberal (representative) model of democracy constitutes the baseline for modern Western Countries democracies. At its core is the notion that individuals are mostly motivated by self-interest and have the right to participate (indirectly) in the determination of the collective will through the medium of elected representatives [5]. The role of liberal politics is to reconcile and aggregate the predetermined interests of different individuals relying on elections as the main transmission mechanism from public opinion to governmental action [10]. This procedural account for democracy is better described as thin democracy, “which reduces decision-making to

voting for elected representatives and relies on the institutions of majoritarianism and adversary politics” [4]. The last decades of democratic practice in the Western societies witnessed a demand for more public involvement in collective decision making, as societies became more networked, linked by new information technologies, and challenged by wicked problems – “problems with ambiguous and inconclusive formulations, imperfect and temporary resolutions, and difficult to assess criteria for judgment” [36]. This interest on citizen participation is primarily justified by the need to limit the “abuses” of a representative system [4, 34]. Also, increased public involvement demands are sustained by both ethical-normative and functionalanalytical arguments, which underline popular sovereignty and political equality as central values of democracy and emphasize public participation as an adequate mean to deal with problems that emerge from social development and environmental change [41]. In this regard, better engagement of citizens in the policymaking process is expected to produce better quality policy, build trust and gain acceptance of policy and share responsibility for policy-making [28]. Public officials recognize that it is not meaningful to rely solely .on experts and to exclude common citizens since considerable expertise resides within the public and therefore it is necessary to find innovative ways of drawing out that expertise and feeding it into the bureaucratized decision-making process [8]. The nature and characteristics of citizens’ involvement has also been a topic of discussion in the last decades. In her ladder of citizen participation Sherry Arnstein proposed a typology of eight levels of participation beginning in “non-participation” levels designed to replace genuine participation (such as manipulation) and reaching the top of the ladder with genuine power sharing among the citizens and public officials. For her, citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power [2]. More recently, Peter Wiedemann and Susanne Femers proposed an alternative ladder that range from the “Public right to know” up to “Public participation in the final decision” [42]. International organizations such as the

0-7695-2507-5/06/$20.00 (C) 2006 IEEE

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OECD also acknowledge the importance of public participation, which must involve the means to be informed, the mechanisms to take part in the decisionmaking and the ability to contribute and influence the policy agenda. These degrees of citizen democratic political participation may be summarized in the terms Information (one-way relationship in which government produces and delivers information), Consultation (a twoway relationship in which citizens provide feedback to government) and Active Participation (a relationship with government in which citizens actively engage in defining the process and content of policy-making) [33]. Nancy Roberts combines the expanded view of citizenship and the concepts of shared power and decision making and defines citizen participation as “the process by which members of a society (those not holding office or administrative positions in government) share power with public officials in making substantive decisions and in taking actions related to the community. The focus is on direct participation (when citizens are personally involved and actively engaged) as opposed to indirect participation (when citizens elect others to represent them) in the decision process” [36]. Actual mechanisms for participation are proposed in accordance with the different interpretations and degrees of participation presented before. In response to the thin democracy model, some propose a quick democracy model (for which direct democracy is a rough synonym) relying on referendum and opinion polls to sense the “public opinion” and base decisions on those measurements. A major criticism arises arguing that they only give access to the immediate response of the public to issues on which they may not be informed and may even not have considered before [38]. Another major criticism, made also to the liberal (thin) democracy model, is directed to the emphasis on preference aggregation through voting mechanisms. It is raised by Social Choice Theorists who claim that all aggregation mechanisms are vulnerable to strategic manipulation. This claim is substantiated by the work of Kenneth Arrow who proved that it is impossible for any individual preferences aggregation mechanism (into collective choices) to simultaneous satisfy five desirable criteria: unanimity, non-dictatorship, transitivity, unrestricted domain, and independence of irrelevant alternatives [3]. Another important result for aggregative democratic theory comes from the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [15, 37] that demonstrates that under any voting scheme there exists the possibility for a single individual to manipulate the process. Building on these criticisms deliberative democrats, who also play down the role of interest aggregation, state that “the essence of democracy itself is now widely taken to be deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even selfgovernment” [10]. Deliberation as a social process is a type of communication process that involves the careful and serious weighing of reasons for and against some proposition [13] and whereby deliberators are willing to change their judgments, preferences and views [10].

Collective choice may be obtained through reasoned agreement, particularly in locality-specific disputes and problems with a relatively small number of identifiable participants who can meet in face-to-face interaction. Another approach (more suitable for large-scale complex issues) elaborates on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy [18] and proposes a discursive, and specifically rhetorical, transmission from the public sphere to the administrative state. This emphasis on public participation through informed deliberation is one of the most important characteristics of recent reflection about the nature and practice of democracy, and it constitutes the conceptual framework of our research efforts. Another important source of change in democratic processes lies on the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their potential to either support existing democratic models or influence the emergence of new democratic practices. These influences may be grouped under the umbrella concept of digital democracy (or e-democracy) defined as “a collection of attempts to practice democracy without the limits of time, space and other physical conditions, using ICT or CMC (Computer Mediated Communications) instead, as an addition, not a replacement for traditional 'analogue' political practices” [20]. This use of ICTs to support democratic processes may be divided into two generic categories, electronic voting (e-voting) and electronic participation (e-participation) [22], which mirror two visions of democracy, procedural and substantive, presented before. It is this latest role of ICTs that we intent to analyze and upon which our research efforts are focused. Among ICTs the Internet is undoubtedly the most promising and influential technology but its potential is yet far from being fully realized, as stated by Ake Gronlund: "e-Democracy IT tools are so far mainly quite simple mainstream systems …” including web sites, e-mail, FAQ lists, chat rooms and (common) discussion forums. However, these tools do not meet the requirements of effective deliberative participation support and “ … more advanced IT tools have to be employed …” [16]. Attempts are being made within different research areas to propose new systems capable of unleashing some of the Internet potential and support public participation (which will be presented on section 3). We propose to organize the public participation process as a global collaborative writing process involving “ordinary” citizens. Participants express their ideas through individual text items supported by official documents. They may also address questions to official entities involved in the process and to other participants. All these different types of contributions are properly organized to facilitate their consultation and retrieval. A statistical model is used to help participants find “related text items” (separate text items suitable to be integrated in a single one) from other participants. Once two participants agree that their separate text items could be integrated they start a collaborative writing process. This process involves

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deciding on a set of actions (add a new paragraph, replace a chapter, …) to perform on one of the text items to include the ideas expressed on the other. Each action may be assigned to one of the co-authors and it can be done synchronously or asynchronously. Once all actions are completed and the results agreed upon and integrated, a new text item emerges. This new joint text item is ready to be integrated again with other individual text items in similar pairwise collaborative writing processes. It is expected that repeating these writing efforts will lead to a smaller set of text items, each one reflecting the common views and opinions of a particular set of participants. The aim is not to produce a single, consensual document but to support collaboration in the writing of as many documents as necessary to reflect all the different points of view, opinions and proposed actions. This set of different discourses becomes the output of the deliberative process and could be used to influence the administrative power. The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. The next section presents the main concepts of deliberative democracy and one of its most relevant streams, the contestation of discourses. It is in this political context that we present in section 3 the currently available e-democracy tools and confront them with the deliberative ideal. Our proposal to support deliberative public participation is detailed in section 4. We also developed a prototype system whose key features are presented on section 5. Section 6 presents some final remarks and considerations about future work.

2. Deliberative democracy contestation of discourses

and

the

Jürgen Habermas is usually considered one of the most influential political philosophers in the modern deliberative democracy. Central to his work is the recognition of the importance of democratic deliberation within the public sphere, the area of public life where intersubjective agreement on values can be reached in order to solve sociopolitical or practical questions [17]. This concept of public sphere is inspired in the early bourgeois European public sphere consisting of conversations in meeting places, debates in newspapers, and political association. Public spheres can also be linked to the concept of civil society. Habermas speaks of the diffuse “subjectless communication” used in public sphere to highlight the contrast with participatory models of democracy (that proceed on a face-to-face basis in small communities) and to reduce the increasing reliance on technological/scientific forms of rationality (thus “repoliticizing” the public sphere). To embody the requirements of discourse within the public sphere, Habermas proposes a theoretical conception called the ideal speech situation where public reasoning is necessarily open and reflective, and different forms of argumentation are acceptable. However, despite the increased emphasis on the importance of the public sphere, Habermas does not dismiss the role of elections as

a mean whereby public opinion can influence the policy practice of the state. As he puts it, “Informal public opinion-formation generates ‘influence’; influence is transformed into ‘communicative power’ through the channels of political elections; and communicative power is again transformed into ‘administrative power’ through legislation” [19]. The work of Jürgen Habermas, particularly his emphasis on deliberation in public spheres, has influenced many theorists of deliberative democracy. Among them, John Dryzek [10] proposes a more critical type of deliberative democracy, termed discursive democracy, that emphasizes the contestation of discourses in the public sphere. Dryzek defines discourse as “a shared way of comprehending the world embedded in language”, having at its center “a story line, which may involve opinions about both facts and values” and featuring “particular assumptions, judgments, contentions, dispositions, and capabilities” [11]. The public sphere is then at any time home to constellations of discourses and the role of deliberation is to promote reflective choice across them. This process of contestation of discourses in the public sphere influences the content of public policy according to the relative weight of these discourses at a given time and place. Therefore, Dryzek proposes to reconceptualize public opinion as the “provisional outcome of the contestation of discourses in the public sphere as transmitted to the state (or transnational authority)”. He proposes that such transmission can be accomplished by a number of different means, including the deployment of rhetoric through the alteration of the terms of political discourse, by creating worries about political instability, and by arguments being heard by public officials. Despite his apparent dismissal of voting as the transmission mechanism, Dryzek also worked on proving the importance of deliberation with respect to the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorems (see previous section). Considering the way deliberation affects people’s preferences, views, judgments and social dispositions through its informational, argumentative, reflective and social aspects, Dryzek and List attempt to relax some of the theorem’s conditions [12]. This account for deliberative democracy is not an exhaustive one. However, Dryzek’s re-conceptualization of public opinion and his emphasis on the contestation of discourses in the public sphere provides, in our view, an important framework to public participation support using ICTs in general and the Internet in particular. Also, his account for alternative means of influencing the contents of public policy, other than through electoral/aggregative mechanisms, sustains a discussion on e-democracy besides e-voting. On the next section we will discuss some of the currently available e-democracy tools and corresponding research efforts being conducted to improve them in light of Dryzek’s vision of deliberative democracy.

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3. e-Democracy paradigm

and

the

deliberative

Along with the evolution of both concepts and practice of democracy, another major development took place. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are increasingly influencing society and, particularly, democracy. Over the last decade, the Internet has undoubtedly been the most influential and pervasive of those technologies. The recognition of the Internet potential to support public participation initiatives derived from the suggestion that it could help to overcome same time and same place constraints posed by traditional faceto-face participatory initiatives. This initial rationale for the use of ICTs has been replaced by a more structured analysis about their potential contributes to the democratic process. When considering the basic Internet tools it is possible to recognize four different ways by which ICTs can support and promote citizen participation [25]: by providing information on a problem and its background, by supporting communication processes, by structuring debates, and by directly supporting decision processes (e.g. through electronic voting). A different taxonomy is proposed to characterize e-democracy initiatives [29]: e-enabling (supporting those who would not typically access the internet and take advantage of the large amount of information available), e-engaging (consulting a wider audience to enable deeper contributions and support deliberative debate on policy issues), and e-empowering (supporting active participation and facilitating bottom-up ideas). Finally, it is possible to outline four possible scenarios for technology supporting democracy [8]: by supporting direct democracy, by supporting civic communities (online communities), using surveys and opinion polls to gauge public opinion, and engaging citizens in policy deliberation, emphasizing the deliberative element within democracy. It is this last model that we wish to consider, in accordance with the contestation of discourses account for deliberative democracy proposed by Dryzek. Nevertheless, all of these attempts to analyze the ICTs role in supporting public participation provide a good framework to evaluate currently available tools and research efforts to improve them. The World Wide Web (WWW) is perhaps the most important basic service provided by the Internet infrastructure. In its simplest form web sites may be used as a repository of necessary information to induce selfreflection and preference formation - two pre-conditions for deliberation. More recently, a special type of web site seems to proliferate on the Internet. Weblogs (or blogs) act like a personal journal of an individual or group of individuals and try to mimic the role of the traditional media (particularly newspapers) and bring into the public sphere topics and point of views that otherwise would pass unnoticed. Weblogs present dated entries listed in reverse chronological sequence [21]. Another interesting development is the Wiki Wiki Web (or just Wiki) invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995

(http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory) whose defining feature is that it allows any user to create and edit any page in a web site. However, despite its apparent “democratic” nature and capability to lead large groups to reach online consensus, the fact remains that every user who disagrees with a statement can very easily deleted it – “… the text on wiki pages is content that has survived the critical eye of the community.”[40] Therefore, this type of support for collaborative effort lacks the structure and coordination capabilities to ensure the production of different agreed documents that can act as representative of the different discourses. In its simplest form web sites provide one-way information flow but it is common to see them combined with other technologies such as chats, forums and online opinion polls to provide a two-way communication channel. Chats provide an interesting communication channel that may be useful to allow individual citizens to discuss among them, with or without the possibility to include experts and/or public officials. Current discussion forums, although very popular, do not properly support deliberation and informed debate since the discussion is structured with links to previous messages, providing an unsorted collection of vaguely associated comments. Computer Supported Argument Visualization (CSAV) [30] aims at shifting from these current online forums to forums designed constructively to visualize arguments and counter arguments, thus enhancing the deliberation potential. Online opinion polls are becoming very popular on the Internet as a tool to quickly and cost effectively collect general public opinions. However, common opinion polls tend to collect instantaneous, non-reflexive opinions. An interesting improvement is proposed by James Fishkin under the designation of deliberative opinion polls [14]. By creating the necessary condition to promote deliberation before the opinion poll takes place, Fishkin proposes to discover what the public would think if it had more opportunity to think about the questions and more information about the issues. Internet is used to distribute relevant and balanced information to participants, support the deliberation process through synchronous audio conferencing and conduct the opinion collection. Despite the major improvement over traditional opinion polls, they still remain limited to deliberation about predetermined options. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) research is looking into participatory approaches to local and regional spatial planning and has proposed new types of systems such as Public Participation Geographical Information Systems - PPGIS [7] and Web-based Public Participation Systems - WPPS [35]. Their functionality includes allowing web browsing of documents and static map images, providing communication channels for discussion and voting, allowing interactive map-based queries, scenario building and on-line commenting. The main rationale behind these proposals is that an important part of local policy decision making has strong geographical references. The main limitations of these

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systems lie on the cognitive demand manipulating GIS systems pose on the common citizen and also on the fact that not all policy problems are geographically related. Efforts are also being made to use Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods to support e-democracy initiatives [31], usually through Web-enabled Decision Support Systems such as the e-negotiation system is being proposed under the TED (Towards Electronic Democracy, http://bayes.escet.urjc.es/ted) project [23]. Again, the systems proposed so far demand a high cognitive effort from the common citizen and seem focused on providing scientific information (improving communication between experts and the public). Furthermore, this approach may not be suitable to deal with the “wicked nature” that characterize societal decision problems [9] and the emphasis on a formalrational approach is contrary to the discursive way proposed by deliberative democrats. A more discursive proposal comes from Murray Turoff (and others) who propose the development of a Social Decision Support System (SDSS) to “support the investigation by large groups of complex topics about which many diverse and opposing views are held” [39]. Contributions to the debate would have to be expressed as an issue, option, comment or relationship between one of the above. A continuous dynamic voting system would help to filter and organize the submitted contributions. Despite the obvious improvement with regard to contribution organization, such a system would have to depend on the citizen ability to post each contribution under the “correct” label. The danger would be of transforming the debate into a meta-debate about the correct label for each contribution (“Is it an option or simply a comment?”). From what has been presented before, the Internet (and particularly the WWW) is a suitable media to provide relevant information to public participation through its most commonly used tools. Efforts are also being made to structure discussion and support public consultation (including opinion collection) about pre-determined issues and respective options. However, support for genuine deliberation is yet far from being achieved and require more than a simple combination of existing Internet tools. “Deliberation is more than merely a discussion of the issues. Emphasis is also given to the product that arises from discussion (e.g., a decision or set of recommendations), and the process through which that product comes about” [1]. In our view, it is necessary to create the conditions so that new options emerge from the process along with an outcome suitable to influence the administrative power. We propose to model public participation as a collaborative writing process supported by the Internet. The outcome of such a process would be a set of documents, each of which representative of a certain discourse and jointly produced by a subgroup of participants. These subgroups would be formed during the participation process according to their preference formation. The resulting set of different documents would constitute the constellation of discourses that could be used to influence the administrative power. On the next

section we will present the public participation model and respective processes that allow for deliberative public participation support.

4. Collaborative Writing as deliberative public participation support Among group collaborative tasks, Collaborative Writing (CW) has been one of the major research areas. The growing use of the Internet and WWW as an underlying environment for collaboration has lead to the development of new tools to support distributed, synchronous and asynchronous, CW on the Web eWriting [24, 27]. A recent survey on Web-based Collaborative Writing Applications (WCWAs) identified 16 different systems [32]. However, most of these systems were designed and built to support collaborative writing efforts of already established, relatively small and cohesive groups and therefore do not take into account group formation and specific coordination support. Others like the Wiki Wiki Web (see previous section) support on-line editing of Web pages accessible to everyone but offer no guarantee that different opinions coexist in the end of the process. They also lack the possibility to outline and program actions before the actual writing occur. Also, none of the presented systems offer a specific communication function to help coordinating the collaborative efforts and to allow for a clear separation between content and coordination information. In the public participation process we propose (see Figure 1), participants start by expressing their ideas on separate text items and then try to integrate them with ideas from other participants. A statistical model is used to help participants to find text items with a similar content and therefore suitable candidates to be joined. Once two participants agree that their individual text items could be joined together in a single one, they form an ad-hoc collaborative writing group. The authoring process takes one of the two text items as baseline and changes it to incorporate the ideas of the other text item. The two authors jointly elaborate a list of operations to be made on the baseline text item (“add chapter”, “delete paragraph”, “change title” …) and assign the operations between them. They also define which operations should be done asynchronously and establish a deadline by which the operations should be completed. Asynchronous operations are executed by the author to whom they are assigned and the result (usually a piece of text) is presented before the agreed deadline. In synchronous mode all operations made by each author are immediately visible to the other, and there is a separate communication channel that allows them to comment on one another’s work. A new version of the “Integrated” text item is created when all operations are completed and the results accepted by both authors. The global participation process may then proceed with the integration of other ideas, expressed in other text items.

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As a "Source" author

Common

As a "Baseline" author

Define an "Integrate" link

Abort

No

Link accepted ? Yes

Suggest actions

Suggest actions

Assign actions Prepare and submit contributions

Collaboratively write integrated contributions

Execute and evaluate actions

Execute and evaluate actions Integrate results Finished ?

No

Yes No

Results accepted ? Yes "Integrated" text item

Figure 1. Collaborative writing process This way, participants have the opportunity to progressively add their efforts and help to produce a set of documents that constitute the constellation of discourses on the public sphere and may be used to influence the administrative power.

4.1. Preparing and submitting a new text item There are several ways a contributor may intervene in the public participation process. The most usual way is to submit a text item with proposals for policies and actions or comments (viewpoints, arguments, rationales or positions) about a certain issue. Text items should be accompanied by the relevant support documents (such as scientific articles, research reports, plans and maps, statistics or budget figures), which constitute another type of contribution. Alternatively, it is possible to make a request for a document that any participant may afterwards respond to by submitting the relevant document. Finally, any participant may pose questions directly to other participants (and/or to public officials and experts) and answer those questions addressed to him/her. The text item is the centerpiece of the whole process. It is composed of a title, one or more chapters (and subchapters) and a list of keywords. Each chapter is composed of a title and a number of paragraphs which may include, besides the text itself, a list of references to the support documents. Each text item has also an author

(contributor of the original text item – see details below), a list of co-authors (who have enhanced the original text item through collaborative writing) and a list of subscribers. One contributor may have different roles with respect to different text items. The author of a text item is responsible for facilitating collaborative writing processes with other contributors and for answering questions regarding his/her text items.

4.2. Defining and accepting an “integrate” link between two text items Each integration process is based on the creation of an ad hoc collaborative writing group composed of two participants that consider that their individual text items may be combined in a single one. One participant identifies a text item from another participant and expresses his/her wish to start a collaborative writing process by creating an “Integrate” link between the two text items. Since this is a directional link (meaning one text item will be integrated into the other) we will refer to the two text items as “Source” (origin of the link) and “Baseline” (destination of the link) to better explain the process (the same designation applies to the respective authors). It is up to the “Baseline” author to accept or reject the link (and the corresponding integration process). If accepted, an iterative process begins to integrate one into the other and, from that moment on, a “private communication channel” is established between

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the two participants involved, and this will support the whole collaborative writing process.

4.3. Creating and managing a “to do list” of actions A list of actions “to do” is used to coordinate the integration effort between the two authors. For instance, if the author of the “Source” text item believes that his/her idea may be incorporated into the “Baseline” text item just by adding a new paragraph to the end of chapter 3.1, then he/she may propose the action “Add a new paragraph to the end of chapter 3.1” to be included in the “to do list”. Both authors may suggest actions to be included in the “to do list” at any time. In fact, the “Source” author may complement the “Integrate” link with the actions he/she considers necessary to conclude the integration process. This may be an extra argument to convince the “Baseline” author to accept the integration process. Not all the actions need to be assigned to one of the authors at the same time. The “Baseline” author chooses which of the proposed actions will in fact be executed and in what order. Some of the actions do not even need to be assigned. For instance, an action to “delete a certain paragraph” just needs to be approved by both authors. It is the “Baseline” author’s responsibility to assign each of the “executable” actions to one of the authors, to decide which actions should be done synchronously and to define a deadline by which a set of actions must be completed.

4.4. Executing and evaluating the actions Each author is responsible for executing separately those asynchronous actions assigned to him/her and for submitting the results before the deadline established by the “Baseline” author. Those actions which are to be executed synchronously require that the authors agree on a specific time to meet on the Internet (considering, for instance, a time schedule presented with the “Integrate” link). When simultaneously online, both authors have the opportunity to execute actions marked as synchronous and comment at the same time on a separate channel (chat-like) as the work progresses. It is expected that these actions will be better coordinated and the results better accepted by both authors since they have had the opportunity to influence how they were carried out. Regardless of the way the actions have been executed, both authors have to accept their results before they are incorporated into a new version of the “Integrated” text item. Some results may be rejected (with due justification) and the respective actions may be reassigned or simply eliminated from the “to do” list.

4.5. Creating the integrated text item Throughout the entire individual collaborative writing process it is up to the “Baseline” author to decide when to

create a new version of the “Integrated” text item and which accepted results should be incorporated into that version. This dispenses the need to wait for all actions to be completed before creating a new version of the “Integrated” text item. Every new version of the “Integrated” text item must be evaluated by both authors as to whether it is a final version, accepted by both authors, or just an intermediate version, still requiring some actions to be performed. Once a successful integration process ends, the “Source” author must decide whether his/her original contribution should remain as a separate contribution to be used in future collaborative writing processes with other text items. The “Baseline” author remains the author of the “Integrated” text item and the “Source” author (together with all co-authors of the “Source” text item) enters the list of co-authors of the “Integrated” text item. It is expected that repeating these pairwise collaborative writing efforts will lead to a smaller set of documents, each one reflecting a particular discourse. This way it will be possible to capture in written documents the constellation of discourses that exist on the public sphere and use them to try to influence the administrative power.

5. Prototype overview A prototype system was developed to support our public participation model, using Microsoft® .NET Framework environment to create, manage and execute Web Services and client Web pages. To account for those activities that require extensive client-side processing (such as producing the “Integrated” text item) we used Javascript and Java® Applets integrated within the client Web pages. This way server-side processing can be alleviated and response times shortened. Persistent data is stored using Microsoft® SQL Server database management system, which can be accessed by the Applets through the Web Services. With this architecture we were able to keep user requirements to a minimum: all that is needed is an Internet Browser and the Java® Plugin (which can be downloaded and installed automatically and for free from the Internet). One key characteristic of the system is that it provides the possibility for two authors to execute some of the tasks synchronously. Since all contributions are presented anonymously it is not possible for any author to directly initiate a synchronous session with another author. Synchronous sessions can only occur between two authors at a time, from the moment an “Integrate” link has been accepted, until the moment the collaboration process has ended (either successfully or not). During this period any author may request to contact the other author of the collaborative writing process. If he/she is logged on, then a special applet (“Network Monitor”) is active and draws his/her attention to an attempt to establish a synchronous connection. If the request is accepted, both authors are notified and the corresponding applets (depending on the type of task to be performed) are presented. Both authors

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propose to model the public participation process as a collaborative writing effort aimed at producing agreed documents that reflect the different (and very often contradictory) discourses present in the public sphere. In our model, participants express their ideas individually divergent phase - and then search for related ideas from other participants. Step by step, related ideas are integrated into a common document through the pairwise collaborative writing efforts of their respective authors convergent phase. The rationale behind this model is that citizens with complementary ideas and opinions should be able to join their efforts and express them on a common discourse, leaving the possibility that others (with contrasting points of view) have the opportunity to do the same. According to our proposal, the global process should be breakdown into pairwise collaborative writing efforts that would follow the steps presented on Figure 1. These should not be considered as “proposed framework to collaborate”, not as fully mandatory steps. For instance, it is possible that, in some of these processes, the “Baseline” author simply accepts the “Integrate” link, immediately produces his/her “Integrated” text item proposal and waits for the “Source” author acceptance. Also, taking advantage of the peer-to-peer application models currently being used on the Internet, almost all of the steps could be done through synchronous interactions between both authors. For instance, “Suggesting actions”, “Executing and evaluating actions” and “Integrating the results” could benefit from being executed synchronously by both authors thus increasing the possibility of an agreement on the results. Like any other collaborative effort, it is important to maintain a high degree of awareness during the entire process. A system is being developed to support these collaborative writing efforts, which is due to be used in a real context participation process. The expected output of such a process is a set of documents, expressing the many different views, proposals and opinions, suitable to influence the administrative decision process.

can then perform the task synchronously (such as suggesting new integration actions, execute actions and elaborate the corresponding text, validate actions result and elaborate the “Integrated” text item). This synchronous mode allows both users to type in text, even on the same paragraph, using the operation propagation principles proposed by Li, Zhou, Muntz and Sun [26]. All synchronous tasks are also supported by a chat-like applet that operates simultaneously during the connection, thus separating comments from content. With respect to this synchronous support, the prototype uses socket programming to allow direct communication between authors (through the applets). However, firewalls and NAT (Network Address Translation - an Internet standard that enables a local-area network to use one set of IP addresses for internal traffic and a second set of addresses for external traffic) inhibit direct socket communication. Therefore we are developing the final system using the JXTA™ technology (www.jxta.org) which allows communication in a peer-to-peer manner. Another key concern, common to all collaborative systems, is awareness notification [6]. Four types of awareness notification are supported: • During the time a participant is not logged on, he/she may be notified of important occurrences (such as an “Integrate” link response from the other author) through electronic mail (provided during the registration); • Upon login, the participant is informed about important occurrences that took place since his/her last login; • During the time a participant is logged on, all relevant occurrences are reported using a periodic web page refresh technique; • As described before, during a synchronous connection both authors are fully aware of the counterpart actions. Some of these awareness features are not yet implemented in the final system but they will be developed to be used in a real context participation process.

Acknowledgements

6. Final remarks

This paper was supported by FCT and FEDER POCTI/EGE/58828/2004.

Despite the adoption of a liberal (representative) democratic model on most Western democracies, a call has been made to allow more public participation outside electoral moments. This approach would profit from the considerably expertise that exists on civil society which can be used to achieve “better” solutions for societal problems that affect the well being of the society in general. An interesting approach has been proposed by deliberative democrats who emphasize deliberation that occurs in the public sphere as an important way to influence administrative decisions. John Dryzek’s constellation of discourses and contestation of discourses in the public sphere provide an interesting framework to consider the use of ICTs (particularly the Internet/WWW) to support public participation. In this context, we

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