Interoperability Requirements, Recommendations and Standards in e-Participation

Abstract

E-participation is understood as the use of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in order to involve all parts of society in political decision-making. The field of e-participation is highly fragmented, mainly due to the large number of different participation areas, stakeholders, levels of engagement, and stages in policy-making involved. A key challenge for overcoming the complexity and current fragmentation of the field is to achieve interoperability between different e-participation systems, i.e. assembling e-participation toolsets dynamically according to respective participation processes and needs, and making use of content from different applications and tools. Unfortunately, e-participation toolboxes that ensure interoperability and make use of standards in order to exchange data with other systems are rare. Interoperation between e-participation systems needs to be investigated first, before it can be ultimately achieved. The chapter addresses these interoperability challenges by (a) contributing to a better understanding of interoperability in regard to e-participation systems, (b) studying the interoperability needs of e-participation, and (c) deriving a set of requirements and guidelines in order to guarantee interoperability among e-participation tools and processes. We present a methodological framework to differentiate interoperability requirements in e-participation solutions in terms of political context, organizational, legal, semantic and technical interoperability.