The other thing is that the egovernace drived eparticipation notion is having a closed view on whati eparticipation. Since it is in current state connected to governments, and not governance, not able to see the whole opensource community, as a great example and as a model that could be adopted on different levels. Particularly, I am not talking about the communities in general, but more likely about the way, how they cooperate and work together.
I have recently participated in the Plone World Conference 2009, and this has proven me a lot of things. According to pep-net, we do not behave like a real opensource community. But shall we? I still lack a common vision…

We’ll have the ParticipateDB blog up shortly where we’ll put those ideas up for review and discussion. In the meantime, here’s a question I had about what kind of project-related information we should capture: https://www.intellitics.com/blog/2009/10/27/participatedb-projects/

I think there may be a question before your one: “Why (or when) would we need an e-participation project to be opensource?”. Currently, I’d answer it in terms of giving assurance that the e-participation service is not dependent on a vendor remaining committed to a particular application – ie community benefit doesnt have to be the main motivation, at least at first.

I think the e-participation community is one of solution providers (or evaluators). The other side of this is that e-participation practitioners are (rightly) less interested in the details of technology (PHP, Java, MySql etc) – the community is more focussed on what can be done with the solutions. Maybe then we’re unlikely in ourselves to support a large community of (unfunded!) developers – they would rightly belong over at drupal.org, wordpress.org etc.

It’s not clear what would happen with specialist tools – some could exist as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal projects (CiviCRM might be agood model) but I guess there will always be standalone applications…

That’s why I was wondering if the single-vendor OSS model like MySQL’s would actually be more realistic, at least as a starting point? At least that way, the code is available to the community, and there is a forum to discuss how to use and develop it (as you say, code by itself is not much use!), share problems and ideas.

Is there an example of a community driven e-participation application? In the Headstar article you say: “Many such projects could be clustered into groups, such as e-petitioning systems or vote matching websites, and within these groups projects could gain a lot from co-operation and perhaps even the construction of an open source solution to solve the similar problems they all face.”

Does this mean we could start thinking about how we’d go about identifying an OSS space which we’d use? (I’ll defer the EUPL/OSOR vs Sourceforge debate for another time)

PS Tim – thanks for your feedback. If you want to see how far it is possible to go with a catalogue of solutions, have you seen cmsmatrix.org? So many factors to take into account… and that’s just choosing a CMS!

It is interesting to see that you are mentioning more general software like Drupal (which is by the way now used by the WhiteHouse website) as potential support tools for eParticipation and not specific open source eParticipation tools. This seems to go along with the point I made in an article I wrote for the Headstar website (https://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=144), which was that many eParticipation project heavily rely on open source technology as the basis for their solutions (languages, databases, server technology, CMS etc.) but that the actual solution is often so special that it cannot easily be transferred to another use-case or into an open source project in itself. There seem to be counter examples however: ePetitioning systems can be used in a very similar way under different circumstances and having an open source system would allow the implementation sites to adjust those last 5% of functionality and design which often cannot be adjusted in proprietary systems.

As far as cataloguing goes: I am very interested in the work Tim does with https://participatedb.com/. Right now there seems to be a problem with a fragmentation of sites which present potential tools. We either need one overarching platform or a standard form of presentation – both in description and source code if we talk about open source technology.

I agree that there is a need to really discuss how the eParticipation community can share information and technology using the open source model. However I do not think that the discussion has to be held on the level of licences and repositories at first (I for example tend to think that https://sourceforge.net/ and https://github.com/ are still the top of the line communities overall – but that´s just my opinion). The most important question we have to tackle right now is “What is necessary to have real open source eParticipation projects?”. We all know that just putting out the source code is of little use to others. Successful open source project live of the community surrounding it and the passion of the people involved helping to improve it. If this development does not take place the availability of source code does not help much and a compiled binary with a good installation guide might be more useful. Therefore those deciding to open source their code have to have a clear vision of how they want to build a community surrounding it.

I am looking forward to help an interesting open source eParticipation project of the ground if those putting it out there keep in mind what is necessary to make a project really open source: community – community – community.

Hadn’t really thought about adding items a the plugin or component level, but why not?

We just started out a few weeks ago and are still adding seed content. A couple of e-consultation projects have been added that used the WordPress blogging engine. Let me know if you have any project examples that ran on Joomla or Drupal (or, wait a few more weeks and you’ll be able to sign up and add them yourself).