Summary of project results
In modern Greece citizens express their opinion on draft legislation in the context of the open consultation through an online platform with limited features. Unfortunately, this feedback mechanism has limited use. The consultation period is too short, citizen contribution is limited and almost unstructured, making processing and exploitation of results difficult. Also, there is no easy way to assess a consultation or measure the impact an open consultation had on the final law. DemocracIT provides a set of user-friendly information technology tools that allow citizens to express themselves in a structured way on the public consultation of the draft laws, even after the end of the official consultation period. It uses cutting-edge technologies to analyze and summarize open consultation comments, facilitating their exploitation. It provides tools and reports that quantify the impact of the open consultation on the law-making process, while encouraging the citizen engagement. Throughout the project, the design, implementation, launching and testing of DemocracIT, a consultation system on a public web platform, was finalized. It can be found in beta version at
http://www.democracit.org, it is usable and publicly available. It includes three functional subsystems: Annotator, Reporter and Evaluator. At the scheduled tests, DemocracIT rated a 4 on a 5-point scale regarding overall usefulness and user friendliness. The source code of DemocracIT is publicly available at github.com, under a free license. 1,600 unique visitors have visited and used the DemocracIT platform during the projects’ timespan, making 3,500 connections and visiting 18,000 pages. 154 people participated in the seminars, webinars and workshops that were held for the dissemination of the project, actively contributing to the improvement of the system. Due to the nature of the project, and since DemocracIT can be used for any kind of consultation, maximum results will be achieved if adopted by key players such as the public administration, civil society organizations, etc.