Web portal E-participacija.si (e-participation.si) represents a starting point for democratic e-participation of Slovenian citizens, NGO's, civil society and other interested parties. It is a place where they can join the decision-making process , influence public policies and debate important issues of public matter on the local, national, european and global level.

The starting point for the web-portal originates out of a research project named Elektronska demokracija na področju okoljevarstva, naravovarstva in ekologije (pdf, 237 kb) (E-democracy on the field of ecology…) which was carried out under Faculty of social sciences (FDV) in cooperation with Institute of ecology (2001). The aplicative goal of this project was to collect and organize links to publicly accessible governmental, municipal, media, nongovernmental, citizen and other web-sites on the field of ecology, which would contain these e-democracy tools (for more check Alexander H. Trechsel et al, 2003):

Main goal of these particular e-democracy tools is to strengthen political participation of citizens in the context of representative (parliamentary) democracy and to stimulate participative, deliberative and other direct forms for inclusion of people into democratic decision-making processes.

Information e-democracy tools (e-access and board for announcements) are meant to increase the transparency of political system. Communication tools, where we can add e-deliberation, e-polls, e-petitions, e-forums, political blog's and different on-line chat-rooms, are meant to strengthen direct participation of citizens and to improve the quality of public opinion. The purpose of decision-making tools (e-voting/e-elections, e-referendum and government e-meetings) is to improve the decision-making process or to find consensus amongst citizens.

Web-links to the mentioned e-democracy tools can be found in these E-participacija.si sections:

Politics and districs section includes e-democracy tools arranged in according to political spheres (ecology, basic human rights, social rights, development, ,economy, foreign politics etc.), where interested citizens, NGO's, experts and others can e-participate. Institutions and organisations section  gathers publicly-available tools of e-democracy on the web pages of local, national, european and global institutions and organisations. Identities section is arranged according to identities or/and memberships of users of the web-portal E-participacija.si (for example students, experts, activists, pensioners...). The democratic process section includes web-links to e-democracy tools according to the level of decision-making process (eg. Identification of the problem, agenda setting, implementation). In the elected politicians and public employees section visitors can find e-mails of Slovenian politicians and public employees.  

Visitors and users of the E-participacija.si portal can join the decision-making process in these ways:

It is another question to what extent exactly is e-participation of the users and visitors of the web-portal E-participacija.si actually used and implemented in the final resolutions of the (governmental) decision-makers. In the representative democracy, this is mostly a question of transparency and openness of the democratic process and the struggle of power between decision-makers and citizens. It also depends whether political system is inclusive - or on the contrary - exclusive and elitistic. Therefore we have a couple of reasons why e-democracy tools must be installed into the decision-making process of the representative democracy - it is one of the conditions for having equal, responsible and effective participation of citizens with the help of the world wide web.

Visitors can find more about these and other current e-participation issues in the Aktualno section, where you'll be able to find interviews, reflections and other news from the e-participation and e-democracy field. Be sure to also check the Knjižnica section, where you can find expert literature and other material.

More info about Center for e-democracy which is based on the Institute for ecology can be found under the Center for eDemocracy section or under Media about the portal section.

The goal of the web-portal E-participacija.si is to collect and arrange web-links and to inform, educate and promote e-democracy and e-participation politics in Slovenia. With the use of open-code applications, web portal would also like to enable e-democracy use for different institutions and others. Some examples of such applications are Forum prihodnosti, E-peticije za civilno družbene akterje or E-posvetovanje občine Kamnik. More info about applicative projects can be found under Portfolijo.

We wish you a nice and usefull use of the E-participacija.si web-portal.

Simon Delakorda, editor of the portal
Center za e-demokracijo{/joso}
[JosObfuscator] /$pkIpnštitut za ekologijo
[JosObfuscator] Štihova 5, 1000 Ljubljana

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