A Participatory Model for Public Decision Analysis

In most decent societies, incorporating citizens’ input in the process of public planning decision-making is important for the legitimacy of any outcome. However, simply enabling more participation will not result in enhanced democracy by itself and an adequate mechanism for participation exercises is vital regardless of the democracy model. Furthermore, it seems reasonable that various new media are of relevance in this context. There have been some suggestions lately, but contemporary methods are to a large extent locked into traditional ways of using computer-based texts and images that largely hamper the capacity for communicating and we will discuss how this might be changed. This keynote describes some current achievements in a project in which the objective is to design a process that involves public participation in a much broader sense than usual. The public is invited to the process by various means, including art projects, flash polls, and various means for dialogues. To a large extent, the area of e-participation lacks real interdisciplinary research. This work within the project can be seen as an attempt to bridge some important paradigms in these respects