Time and Cost Saving E-Participation Tool Primed for Launch

Adding to a series of recent remarkable achievements, the Ulster Business School led a multidisciplinary research team in a flagship European Commission e-participation project that successfully piloted the Electronic Town Meeting (eTM) for Citizens Involvement under the one million pound EC-funded PARTERRE Project.

Consultations, focus groups, brainstorming meetings are an essential part of today’s organisational processes in terms of good practice, but note taking, report writing and publishing can be an excruciatingly lengthy process and restrict time-efficient policy and project developments.

Thanks to a successfully piloted eTM ‘turnkey’-style methodology and software tool, governmental bodies and organisations with an interest in focus groups will be able to gather stakeholders, lead a meeting and produce a transparent, verified and final report in one session, improving accountability, clarity and saving time and resources.

With a clever combination of simultaneous group discussions reported electronically by each group facilitator to theme-dedicated teams who in turn cross-reference the data received and produce a combined overall electronic report in real time, consultees enjoy immediate access to the final consultation or meeting report which they can approve before leaving the meeting. The final report is presented in a ready-packaged structure, is typo free and accessible in an instant. Final approval is facilitated and transparency and accountability are greatly improved.

This versatile e-participation package caters for both online and offline consultations, and provides the ultimate solution to high quality consultation events, regardless of the number of participants. The eTM has previously been successfully deployed in Italy by Avventura Urbana with events involving up to 1,000 participants. Through the EC funded PARTERRE project, the aim was to broaden the business case and make necessary minor technical adaptations to the eTM, in order to progress sustainable eParticipation across Europe. The eTM was successfully piloted in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Italy and Finland and overall participant satisfaction levels were in excess of 90%.

The user-friendly e-participation tool has been deployed in cases of remote and multi-lingual consultations, making it a future must-have for local, regional and EU meetings.

A powerful indicator of the success of the eTM and the PARTERRE project was the endorsement of the EC through the publication of the PARTERRE project as an exemplar eParticipation case study on the EC’s influential ePractice website (www.epractice.eu).

Brendan Galbraith, Lecturer and innovation expert at the Ulster Business School, who led the multidisciplinary PARTERRE project team at the University of Ulster said:

“In our pilots of the eTM service in Ulster, we realised that our smaller user groups required a leaner version of the eTM, so we made some minor modifications so that it could be set up and used in less time to make it a sustainable service. In our pilots for the PARTERRE project I think we have successfully piloted a lighter version of the eTM. It is gratifying that the success of PARTERRE has been commended through its publication as an exemplar on the EC’s ePractice website. ”

Francesco Molinari, an external expert to the Regional Government of Tuscany and the dissemination manager for the PARTERRE project said: “I see this project as a big step forward in the direction of sustainable eParticipation. By this I mean the integration of ICT innovation with citizen (or stakeholder) engagement in a way that is both politically correct and positively impacting on institutional and behavioural change.

“In Parterre, we have kind of invented a recipe, a formula for sustainable eParticipation that is both simple to grasp and easy to adopt/adapt to one’s own policy environment. And I think that particularly here in Northern Ireland, we have started to realise its benefits.