Orientation of proposal

Encourage cooperative work between researchers, civic networks and freeware companies in view to developing tools capable of fuelling democratic debate by more participatory approaches.

Context

Many community and/or political networks seek to promote, in parallel with renewed forms of representative democracy, dynamic forms of participatory democracy (consensus conferences, participatory budgets, district organisations, etc.). Without waiting for ICTs to arrive, some of them have also sought to develop tools to facilitate democratic debate (for example, Abaque de Régnier, Péricles, etc.). Since these initiatives, different experiences such as electronic consensus forums experiment with democratic participation via the Internet. Companies working in the non-profit sector and the actors on the militant and community Internet are now drawing together to open up new, creative perspectives.