The latest edition of the European Journal of ePractice is dedicated entirely to the topic of e-participation. One article contained a useful description of the term e-consultation (actual quote taken from the PDF download, 135 KB): E-consultations: New tools for civic engagement or facades for political correctness?
2) Defining e-consultations
E-consultations constitute interactive “tell-us-what-you-think” on-line platforms where ordinary citizens, civic actors, experts, and politicians purposively assemble to provide input, deliberate, inform, and influence policy and decision making. Initiated by political institutions, non-state actors (or jointly), e-consultations vary in approach, goals, selection of target groups, breadth of themes or issue areas, in the use of technical tools and administrative level at which they are launched (Gøtze 2001). They often simultaneously incorporate vertical citizen-to-government as well as horizontal spaces for citizen-to-citizen interactions. The fact that citizens are provided the opportunity to influence policy making processes makes e-consultations distinct from other spaces in the informal virtual public sphere. In informal discursive e-spaces such as virtual communities, topical forums, chat rooms or newsgroups, participants interact as equals and may but do not explicitly seek to wield political influence. The raison d’être of e-consultations is to affect formal (institutional) political and decision making processes.
E-consultations are also more formal and structured than discussions in the informal virtual public sphere. They tend to have a set duration, agenda, employ the use of moderators, with topics for discussion pre-defined by the host. Given that it is government agencies that in most cases initiate e-consultations, relationships among participants are seen to be asymmetric where the actors involved – politicians, policy experts, citizens – differ in their level of authority, expertise and access to decision-making processes. Arguably, as it will be later discussed, these implicit structural dynamics distinctly influence the e-consultation process.
The article goes on to list five types of e-consultations:
- Question and answer discussion forums
- Online polls
- E-petitions
- E-panels
- Editorial consultations
The kind of e-consultation we have in mind here at Intellitics is probably a combination of all five.
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