ICT for dialogue and inclusive decision-making

Public consultations are a weak but institutionally embedded form of civic participation in political decision-making. Their input and output are often a cause for concern, and this has motivated us to designed the inDialogue platform to help transmit knowledge about the methodology of public consultations. It follows the deliberative public consultation model, and recognizes the value of social inclusion in knowledge-sharing and argument exchange in building an open political community. In this book the authors—researchers from the disciplines of computer science and social sciences as well as practitioners in the areas of local government, electronic administration services, and WCAG 2.0—discuss various aspects of the inDialogue software’s development and implementation. In doing so they have documented the complexity of the work carried out in an applied interdisciplinary project in the area of democratic innovations.