A briefing paper for research at EU level on

eGovernance and eParticipation – in support of an eSociety

This paper aims to highlight a number of important public sector challenges that will be
faced in the coming decade. Conventional wisdoms and familiar governance models will be
challenged as ICT based disruptions impinge on democratic, consultative and policy making
processes. Evidence already gathered can anticipate that the scope and scale of
transformation will have a major impact on society. The paper concludes by indicating a
number of research activities that could pave the way to solutions.

Analysis and Challenges

Since 2005 there has been a phenomenal growth in mass, on-line collaborative applications, moreover
the collaborations have a number of different formats (e.g. Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook,
amongst others). Cyber-collaboration has captured the imagination and creative potential of millions
of participants - particularly the young. In addition to new forms of leisure pursuits, community-
building activities have also entered the political arena as witnessed in a number of recent national
elections. On-line communities can leverage considerable human knowledge and expertise and
rapidly build their capacity. At the same time it is now recognised that on-line collaborations have
the potential to trigger and shape significant changes in the way future (e)societies will function.
Extrapolation of the present exponential growth leads to scenarios where very large percentages of
populations could, if equipped with right tools, simultaneously voice opinions and views on major
and minor societal challenges, and thereby herald the transition to a different form of dynamically
participative "eSociety". While such scenarios are readily imaginable, we also recognise that we
currently do not have appropriate governance models, process flows, or analytical tools with
which to properly understand, interpret, visualise and harness the forces that could be
unleashed.
Present government processes (local, regional, national and EU level) provision laws and regulations,
interpret and define societal norms and deliver societal support services. Their legitimacy is derived
through democratic processes combined with a requirement of transparency and accountability. In a
world that is increasingly using non-physical communication and borderless interaction, traditional
roles and responsibilities of public administrations will be subject to considerable change and
classical boundaries between citizens and their governments are blurring. The balance of power
between governments, societal actors and the population will have to adapt to these challenging new
possibilities.
A key issue will be to develop and apply advanced ICT's to provide robust support the change process
and herald the transition to a new, digitally derived, legitimacy. Inherent in this process is the
definition and realisation of new, carefully crafted governance models.
By 2020 there will be no barriers any more for citizens and businesses to participate in decision
making at all levels, hence overcoming the present democratic deficit. Advanced tools – possibly
building on gaming and virtual reality technologies will enable citizens to track the totality of
decision making processes and see how their contributions have been (or are being) taken into
account. Current linguistic and cultural barriers will have been largely overcome through use of
semantic-based cooperation platforms. Opinion mining, visualisation and modelling into virtual
reality based outcomes and scenarios will help to both shape, guide and form public opinion. The
processes and tools will have to demonstrate transparency and trust and be devoid of manipulation.
The outcomes of such consultative processes should be faster, more efficient in terms of revising
policy and making decisions.
Also by 2020, transparency and trust in the context of an eSociety will characterise a changed
relationship between governments, businesses and citizens. Governments traditionally collect, process
and store significant quantities of data. By 2020, the relationships will have changed and businesses
and citizens will "authorise" access by governments to "data spaces" of their own data which they
control and update. Such a scenario would result in a "private shared space" jointly accessed by data
users and data providers. Equivalent data spaces will be adopted by businesses. These shared spaces
will require maximally robust access rules and procedures and hence new technologies and tools that
ensure privacy and data protection. Trust in such technologies will need to be earned.

FP7 ICT Research Workprogramme 2009-10 Consideration David Broster, European Commission, December 2007
Research Orientations

• Intelligent Mass Cooperation Platforms: Tools and technologies that build on and extrapolate
from Web 2.0 and future Web 3.0 tools, for bottom-up, user-controlled, massive social
collaboration and networking applications. Incorporating mixed reality applications based on
semantic cooperation platforms that traverse language and cultural interpretation thereby enabling
multi-national groups to create, learn and share information and knowledge.

• Governance Toolbox: Technologies and tools to embody structural, organisational and new
governance models plus associated procedures, that enable groups to form, engage, create, learn
and share and track group knowledge. The toolbox must include identity and access controls to
ensure delineation of constituency domains where appropriate.

• Real-time Opinion Visualisation: Tools and technologies to support virtual community opinion
forming, incorporating: simulation, visualisation and mixed reality technologies, data and opinion
mining, filtering and consolidation. Citizen participation implies the ability to track the whole
public sector decision making process and see whether and how contributions have been
considered.

• Policy Modelling, Tracking and Visualisation: to manipulate and exploit the vast reserves of
Europe's public sector collective data and knowledge resources. Semantic web applications to
access and visualise background knowledge repositories to the public. Tools include; translation,
process modelling, data mining, pattern recognition and visualisation and other gaming-based
simulation, forecasting and back-casting, and goal-based optimisation techniques.

• Policy Simulations: Tools and technologies to animate large-scale societal simulations that
forecast potential outcomes and impacts of proposed policy measures. Parameters include impacts
on movements of people, commuters, goods and services, jobs, costs, benefits, social impact and
resulting social burdens. The public sector will use these tools to examine options based on the
simulated behaviour and wishes of individuals, groups or society as a whole to understand the
possible outcomes of government proposals, decisions, legislation, etc.

• Personal Shared, Secure Data Spaces and Agent Support Tools: The scale and complexity of the
public sector, and its technical intertwining with other actors in society, set quite unique
requirements for trust and liability, prevention of unauthorised access, misuse and fraud. The
tools must be able to encompass multiple identities, pseudonymity, authentication, secure data
disposal, etc. Authorised proxy controls will also be required with appropriate security to
administer within a family (parents acting on behalf of children or the elderly), or for trusted third
parties, or in bone-fide business associations. Citizens and businesses will also become reliant on
customisable Personal Governance models that support multiple roles and identities. User's
support would be managed and animated through intelligent agents or avatars which learn from
the user’s past behaviour, expressed wishes, or legal decisions and respond according to within
the bounds of established governance rules. Given the complexity of these scenarios, intelligent
agent technologies should also be developed to assist in the control and maintenance of
information tagging access, access audits, data durability (lifetime) and validity / obsolescence
and deletion.

The budget envelope for the work described above has yet to be determined. It is proposed to define
the objectives in WP2009-2010 initiating the research work in a call in 2009. Instruments suitable
for this work include "Integrated Projects (IP)", "Specific Targeted Research Projects (STREPs)"
accompanied by Specific Coordination and Support Actions.

FP7 ICT Research Workprogramme 2009-10 Consideration David Broster, European Commission, December 2007