The openDCN project aims at promoting citizens participation and at linking citizens to their institutions and other decision makers with information products, a communication framework and, finally, an on-line deliberative space capable to involve them in the decision-making process, i.e. to define and put in action initiatives in the field of governance policies and sustainable development for their territory.

The goal of the openDCN project is to enhance the effectiveness of participative processes by conceiving, designing and implementing a socio-technical, computer-enabled, trusted environment for e-participation and fostering the evolution of the classic community-network concept into a new consultative-deliberative paradigm.

In particular, openDCN consists of two main interrelated spaces:

• the community space, aimed at fostering public dialog on civic issues and facilitating the rise of mutual trust between participants through free discussions; the mail tool in this area is the CityMap;
• the deliberation space to foster the creation of a shared vision position among the participants, i.e., to finalize a deliberative process in order to produce a well defined outcome. Deliberation space makes up the core of the participatory system; participatory processes consist of a series of deliberation stages, each relying on a different participatory modality and involving different participants. This therefore calls for outright structured participatory processes, divided into clearly distinct phases, each of which relies on a specific deliberation tool (the Informed Discussion, the On-Line Ordered Meeting and the Certified Citizen Consultation). Despite their differences, all the deliberation tools share three architectural functionalities: identifying the actors, framing the issue, and producing a shared position that summarizes the outcome of the deliberation processThe various phases are combined in a single structured participatory process: the process-building module, also called the Agenda.

The CityMap represents the map of participation activities in the city, allowing people to “tag” places of a territory with related discussions and documents. It aims to foster free dialog on community issues as the basis for establishing a climate of mutual trust among participants, for sharing civic intelligence and for promoting civic engagement. In order to do this, each discussion is localized in a map (namely a Google Map©).

The Agenda is the tool designed for outlining and managing the deliberative process, as well as for coordinating all the deliberation tools associated with a certain stage of the process.

The Informed Discussion tool is an enriched forum with facilities for sharing information resources to support the discussion and for finalizing the discussion by producing, asynchronously and collaboratively, a summary document.

The On-Line Ordered Meeting tool structures synchronous on-line debate finalized to making decisions. It can be seen as an advanced chat where times and modes of interaction are organized by a set of business-meeting rules adopted to support a fair decision-making discussion. This tool is useful to support limited groups of people who have to work together synchronously on very specific issues or on bound domains. The idea and the design of the On-Line Ordered Meeting were heavily inspired by the earlier work of Doug Schuler and his team, who conceived and implemented e-Liberate. 

The Certified Citizen Consultation tool polls among participants, who choose among alternatives, thanks to a variety of polling modalities; Certified Consultation is suitable when the opinion of a large number of people must be heard.

3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."