The pilot project "Promoting Linked Open Data (LOD), Free Software and Civil Society Participation in Law-Making throughout the EU", in short "Linked Open Data and eParticipation", has been launched in 2015 on request of the European Parliament. It aims to promote the development and use of tools enabling civil society throughout the EU to participate in the preparation of standard-compliant documents throughout the law-making process, and to facilitate the integration of these tools in the Linked Open Data framework.
This is possible through a Web platform allowing citizens and other stakeholders to actively participate in public consultations within the EU decision-making process. By the platform facilities, citizens can provide comments and amendments on pre-legislative documents, as well as expressing sentiments on them (agreement/disagreement), at the level of the articles.
Legislative proposals are directly visible and accessible on the platform, and citizens can directly add their contributions in the form of comments and proposed amendments to the text. They can also interact with each other and rate the contributions of others. Apart from suggesting amendments edited in track-change mode, citizens can express their general feelings about a legislative proposal and even about parts of the proposal, ranging from “positive” or “neutral” to “negative”. Comments are directly linked to the relevant fragment of the proposal. All contributions are machine-translated in order to enable citizens to follow the discussion even if other contributors are using a language that they do not understand. Machine translation is based on Commission's MT@EC service (see https://ec.europa.eu/info/resources-partners/machine-translation-public…). Furthermore, the results of the discussion are transparent and easy to follow thanks to a number of comprehensive statistics and graphical visualisations of the global trends which are shown directly on the platform.
The project has been realised by the Publications Office of the EU (OP). The main outcome of the project is a fully operational prototype of an e-Participation platform for the discussion of EU legislative proposals.
The current version of the e-Participation platform is a prototype providing a limited set of functionalities focussed on facilitating citizens’ participation in law making. However, it is possible to envisage using the platform for a large variety of other use cases, such as open consultations or even closed user group discussions on various types of documents.
