Speech by Sabrina Franceschini - Emilia-Romagna Region - and Lucia Mazzoni - ASTER – at the Sixth International EGOV Conference 2007 [Regensburg, 2007/09/04]

1. Partecipa.net:
a Kit of Methods and Tools for
eParticipation Processes
Sixth International EGOV Conference 2007
Regensburg – 2007/09/04
Sabrina Franceschini, Lucia Mazzoni
Emilia-Romagna regional Government, Aster
partecipanet@regione.emilia-romagna.it
www.partecipa.net

2. Introduction
Since 2004 the Emilia-Romagna Regional
Government (Italy) is engaged in an e-participation
project
Partecipa.net is an e-democracy project aimed to
stimulate the citizens participation through new
mechanisms and new information systems
The project is testing a permanent connection
system allowing telematic participation of citizens to
the definition of local policies

3. Promotional video
START

4. Budget & Timing
• Partecipa.net is partially funded by Italian Innovation
Ministry
•Requires an economical co-participation of each
partner
• Budget: 730.700 euro for 24 months, 300.000 from
the Ministry
• Start date: September 1, 2005
• End date: October 31, 2007

5. Aims
•To define and create participation processes in an
integrated manner;
• to promote participation within and outside the
administrations;
• to provide a tool usable by all level of PA;
• to define, test and disseminate the methodology;
> Partecipa.net has been designed as a project based
on collaborative learning where all involved partners
(PAs, citizens associations) contribute to increasing
the culture of participation to the political choices, in
the spirit of a true governance.

6. Outputs
• e-democracy portal: www.partecipa.net
• creation of an E-democracy Kit;
• implementation of the kit by the PAs partner of the
project;
• testing of the kit through the realisation of
participation processes on Urban planning;
• creation of a committed working community

7. E-democracy kit: tools
a set of open source software tools to that allow citizens to:
implement technologies to:
distribute information receive information on selected
issues via different channels
address questions on specific
enable the dialogue
themes and get on line personalized
between PA and
answers from experts
citizens
take part to on-line forums
access on-line technical
d
documentation (library)
consultation take part to surveys

8. E-democracy kit: guidelines and
methodologies
• Guidelines to organize an editorial team to publish
thematic information and manage personal
consultancy
•A moderation methodology to manage on-line forum,
guidelines to service implementation and how to set-up
a moderation team
•A methodology to obtain and publish participation
processes results from the moderation team
•A methodology of filing and storing, to manage results
and contributions from the moderation team

9. Criticalities and shortcomings
• project timing <> political/administrative timing
• to involve decision-makers and citizens
• lack of communication => participation needs a lot of
communication!!
• difficult to create a developer and user community to
manage the tools

10. Next steps
• end of the project activities and evaluation
• new ICT plan of the Emilia-Romagna region
(2007-2009) 
• new PAs users of the Kit, new e-dem processes from
the Partecipa.net partners
• European project?