AN OPERATIONALIZATION FOR COLLECTING EXPERTS' OPINIONS ON THE DESIGN OF AN E-DELIBERATION TOOL

Background: In practice, e-democracy is based on two pillars – one is e-participation and the other is e-voting. The development of e-government is a major technological achievement allowing citizens to participate equally in the political process. E-government and E-Participation, as a part of e-democracy, encompass social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination. Information and Communications Technology can be a powerful tool to increase the quality of public policy, citizens understanding of public policy issues and their participation in government policy making. International Relevance: According to the Government Online International Network, governments around the globe are actively promoting online consultations in order to strengthen democracy and development (Poland, 2001). Yet, a major citizens’ concern about the usage of e-democracy tools, and more specifically, e-deliberation apparatuses is data security and confidentiality. Within a process of expressing political opinions, citizens need to be reassured that the collected data will only be used for the intended purposes and the possibility of data leakage will be minimized. While mainstream technology (firewalls, encrypted databases, etc.) can provide quite a substantial level of security, data confidentiality issues arise every day. Aim: The aim of this paper is to report on the first phase of an ongoing research aimed at designing, developing and testing an e-deliberation tool. This first phase represents the collection of experts’ opinions for the design of an e-deliberation tool through literature review, survey with experts and expert group workshops. We present the operationalization of a series of criteria for e-deliberation tool comparison. This operationalization will be used to build a questionnaire for experts in the field of e-deliberation and to guide data collection though a series of expert group workshops. Methodology: A review of the literature has been performed in order to select relevant criteria and variables which will be used to build a questionnaire for experts in the field of e-deliberation. We report on the operationalization of these variables and criteria. Impact: The results of this research will be used to further inform e-deliberation tool development.