What do you think about eParticipation?

At the eParticipation Day 2009 in Brussels the Regione Toscana did an instant poll among the attendees asking them what they think eParticipation should achieve and what its actual impact will be. Francesco Molinari wrote an article about this effort and its results on this blog earlier on. The persons surveyed at this event where a set of the most engaged and active proponents of eParticipation in Europe and it seemed useful to repeat this kind of short questionnaire here on the PEP-NET blog to see whether there are any significant differences between the answers. For the last few weeks two of the questions where posted in the right hand colon of the website and now I would like to present the results so far.

What is eParticipation expected to achieve?

How will eParticipation change the nature of public engagement and politics?

A large majority of persons asked on PEP-NET.eu see the improvement of the quality of decision making and the reduction of the democratic deficit as the most important tasks of eParticipation. These two answers where also favoured by the persons asked at the eParticipation Day. Furthermore over 50% said that eParticipation will spread political power throughout society. This answered was given by 39% of persons questioned at the eParticipation Day making it the most frequented answer to this question there also. Keeping in mind the fairly small sets of data (28 answers on PEP-NET.eu) in both surveys the results are similar to each other. We will keep leave the survey on the PEP-NET side and revisited the results in a few weeks to see whether there have been any significant changes in the preferences voiced by the visitors of PEP-NET.eu.

Tags: eParticipation, survey