iLeger is a Web Application that seeks to concentrate, in a single place, the stakeholders in a political election allowing multi-directional and structured communication between them. Using a citizen and candidate centered approach; iLeger supports collaborative interaction with the purpose of fostering communication, deliberation and participation. This paper aims at presenting the main functionalities of this Web application, as well as the results from a case study about the Portuguese Presidential Elections held in 2011

1. iLeger: A Web Based Application for Participative
Elections
Artur Afonso Sousa Pedro Agante Luís Borges Gouveia
Polytechnic Institute of Viseu Libertrium University Fernando Pessoa
ajas@di.estv.ipv.pt pedroagante@libertrium.com lmbg@ufp.edu.pt
2011 – Delft, Holland

2. Project Objectives
• Improve interaction between candidates and citizens
during the electoral period.
• Encourage citizen participation
• Narrow the gap between citizens and politicians
• Foster debate, deliberation and knowledge sharing

3. What is iLeger?
Web platform that joins the key stakeholders in an election
and allows the creation and management of multiple
participation events.

4. Questions from the community
• Citizens raise questions, in previously defined topics,
simultaneously to all candidates.
• Candidates answer the best questions.
• Citizens compare side by side the answers from different
candidates to the same question.

5. Proposals and ideas from the community
• Gather the ideas from the community to solve the
problems on different topics of governance.
• Encourage citizens to expose what they would do if they
were the candidates and highlight the best ideas.

6. The opinion of the community - Polls
• Invite citizens to express their views on key issues of the
election.

7. Live debates
• Create an open dialogue between citizens and candidates
or representatives of the candidatures.

8. Platform Management
• Manage user and editorial content through a
dedicated backoffice.
• Main features:
– Management of participation
events
– Content management
– User management
– Moderation

9. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections
• 23512 unique visitors and 947 distinct users who have
logged in.
logged in unique visitors ratio ≈ 4%
• The editor accepted 187 of the 253 questions and 181 of
the 201 ideas proposed by the users
Rejection rate of 10%

10. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections
• From the 23512 unique visitors, 9862 entered iLeger for the
first time during live debates.
Great interest of citizens to participate in live events of short
duration
• From the 23512 unique visitors, 845 users actively interacted
(written content and voting) with iLeger
3.5% of unique visitors actively participating in iLeger

11. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections
• From the 947 distinct users who have logged in, 845 users
actively interacted (written content and voting) with
iLeger
89% of the users that logged in, actively participated in
iLeger
• All the six candidatures were invited to join and
participate in iLeger and all of them accepted

12. iLeger – Timeline
September 2009 – Parlamentary Elections in Portugal (test
Version)
October 2009 – Local Elections in Portugal (test in VISEU)
October 2010 – Partnership Portugal Telecom Portal - SAPO
December 2010 – Elections for Head of the Portuguese Medical
Association
January 2011 - Portuguese Presidential Elections

13. Conclusions
• Candidates are well aware of the current momentum in
Internet-based social networks and dedicate more and
more financial and human resources for transmitting
their messages across the electorate through Web
channels.
• From the experience gather during the 2011 Portuguese
presidential election we can conclude that publicity is a
key factor in this kind of initiatives.
• We believe that continuous dialogue may also improve
citizen trust and accountability of politicians, although
more research is needed to confirm this assumption.

14. Future Work
• Support for candidate-staff workflow
• Incorporate comments in the section dedicated to citizen
polls to foster deliberation about the issues under
discussion
• Implement citizen reputation schemes
• Develop notification mechanism on updates
• Display charts with statistical information derived from
the contents of iLeger

15. Thank y u
www.liberopinion.com