Ideas for a better place: e-participation tools supporting decision making process at the local level

E-participation in decision making is gaining ground. An increasing number of administrations recently tries to promote interaction processes at all levels of government. Starting from the successful experience of the “ideario per Cagliari”, a crowd-sourcing tool that collected more than 500 ideas in few months for the strategic development of the city of Cagliari (Sardinia), the authors present an overview of the work-in-progress on a series of methods and tools to encourage participation and pursuing consensus, in order to identify consistent policy choices for administrations. The task of the paper is to test the usefulness and opportunities coming from a mix of e-participation and “proactive” decision support tools and propose an interactive and participatory policy-making process. We conclude that eparticipation is extremely useful since it provides an administration with a simple, immediate and free use of a pool of ideas and proposals previously unimaginable. On the other hand, a tool for the structuration of the strategic process in basic elements, goals and actions, is potentially useful for better organizational planning: representation of ideas, clustering in strategic options, and generation of sets of requirements on specific themes. They may act as inputs for further discussion and successful implementation of community development projects.