This action wants to collect, enhance, consolidate and integrate existing stakeholder consultation and publish it as a reusable solution package.

Owner

European Commission - DIGIT B.4

Supra-national authority

Contact information

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When is this action of interest to you?

You are an EU institution or a Member State public administration that wants to gather measures and analyse large quantities of data including citizens' opinions, needs and preferences by allowing the electronic participation of stakeholders. You are a European citizen wanting to voice your opinion and influence the decisions of your government. This action will contribute to making governments more open and participatory throughout Europe, by addressing the challenges around opinion elicitations with a main focus on reuse of existing assets.

What is this action about?

Acquiring citizens’ opinions is a challenging task for many public administrations, which often lack the means to analyse large quantities of semi-structured or unstructured information. European institutions and Member States' public administrations have launched several initiatives to collect citizens' opinions when consulting stakeholders but these activities were mostly fragmented and had limited cross-organisational or cross-border cooperation.

Through the implementation of practical activities, this action wants to collect, enhance, consolidate and integrate existing stakeholder consultation and publish it as a reusable solution package.

Firstly, the action will focus on the identification of the requirements stemming from the public administrations in the different Member States. Secondly, the action will assess existing assets, reusable software solutions, standards and vocabularies that can address the identified needs. Finally, the identified solutions will be consolidated and generalised in order to allow them to be used in different business contexts that aim to address a common challenge.

By providing a toolbox for the collection of opinions from various digital sources in a standardised manner, the action will enable public administrations to manage open knowledge in a coherent way and extract meaningful knowledge that can help stakeholders and policymakers reshape decisions.

What are the objectives?

Consolidate and integrate existing reusable tools that allow the electronic participation of stakeholders, the analysis of the captured opinions and the discovery and generation of knowledge.

What are the benefits?

The action will support public administrations to better address the expectations of their stakeholders.
Citizens will increasingly be reached through e-participation and open knowledge sharing. This will ensure higher rates of collaboration as compared, for instance, to traditional expert consultations.
Efficiency will increase by:
- reducing time to make the right decisions;
- getting the right knowledge/people as needed.
There will be a major involvement of users working in administrations resulting in:
- an increased generation of knowledge;
- maximum reuse of the knowledge;
- higher quality of the activities carried out through the sharing of the knowledge;
- an easy clustering of the expertise of the users.
Citizens and business will be able to voice their opinion, build consensus around their own ideas and influence the decisions of governments through a transparent process (supporting e-participation).

What are the next steps?

This action has been newly introduced in the 2015 work programme and the work is currently being launched.

The action will execute a study with the aim to cooperate with EU Member States and Policy DGs in order to identify a list of use cases related to e-Participation, opinion elicitation and knowledge discovery and generation. Through this process a number of good practices, lessons learnt and reusable solutions shall be identified and subsequently discover gaps for new reusable solutions based on the needs of Member States and Policy DGs.

In addition to the study the action will also execute pilots whereby existing assets, reusable software solutions, standards and vocabularies are explored and assessed as a means of addressing specific needs. The consolidation and generalisation of a number of identified solutions shall demonstrate their usefulness in different areas that aim to address a common challenge. These will be made available for reuse.