The EU’s Publication Office has just published the source code for a prototype of an eParticipation portal, allowing citizens to help draft EU legislative proposals. The code for the prototype is the result of a so-called pilot project, launched by the European Parliament in 2015. Such pilot projects are tacked onto the Parliaments’ approval of the annual budget for the European Commission.
The code for the ‘Linked Open Data and eParticipation’ project was published on the Joinup eGovernment platform on 4 April. The code is made available under the European Union’s Public Licence (EUPL).
The prototype portal lets citizens and all other stakeholders take part in the EU decision-making process. Online, users can add comments on documents, and indicate if they agree with the texts. They can suggests alternative texts, using ‘track-changes’ and they can discuss the texts with others.
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The portal uses the European Commission’s machine translation service MT@EC, to translate all suggestions and comments into all EU languages. To improve key-word search, the developers built-in Eurovoc, a thesaurus of terms related to EU activities, in 26 languages.
The software allows users to follow activities per country, per group and per document, and can display visualisations of activity for each legislative proposal. All data managed by the platform is stored and published as Linked Open Data, and is made accessible for reuse.
To install and run the prototype, users need Apache Maven, Java, Virtuoso middle ware and a Linux server host.