An online social networking platform designed to involve more European citizens, particularly young people, in shaping public policy was launched last week as part of a two-year European Commission- funded research project.
The platform (http://www.ideal-debate.eu )is designed to encourage citizens to debate the implications of global warming, with the results set to feed into a draft policy on the issue to be drawn up later in the year by the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee on Climate Change.
As well as discussion forums and document and video exchange, features of the online tool include the ability to track the activities of other users with a ‘follow them’ facility. Anyone can register to read content, although people cannot post to the debate anonymously and there is a strong authentication process to confirm the identity of key stakeholders or experts such as senior politicians or scientists.
Debate on the site will take place in English and in the mother tongues of the three regional governments which are the main partners in the project: Tuscany in Italy, Poitou-Charentes in France and Catalonia in Spain. The experiment forms part of a wider, two-year research project, ‘IDEAL-EU’ (http://www.ideal-eu.net ), launched in January this year by the three regions with 550,000 euros of European Commission funding. The project has two main objectives: to improve citizen involvement with the creation of EU legislation and to integrate e-participation into the administrative process at regional level.
The social networking trial will be followed in November by a ‘pan-European electronic town meeting on climate change’ involving three physical meetings of around 150 invited citizens each in the partner regions and a series of virtual meetings online. Each will involve facilitated discussion and electronic voting using handsets in the physical meetings and internet voting in the virtual meetings.
The outcomes will be fed to the European Parliament and used by the three regions to explore the possibilities for greater integration of online participation tools in their administrative processes.
