Open Content Systems for E-governance: the Case of Environmental Planning

Within the field of environmental spatial decision and policy making the use of ICTs is currently limited to rudimentary aspects of the planning process and is focused on the duplication of available systems and processes. Over recent years large projects have been carried out and a range of tools has been developed but, the majority of the systems developed merely mirror traditional methods of interacting with local planning services. Many of these new services are failing to exploit the full potential of ICTs and public participation due to the scarce focus they assign to the cognitive and organizational dimensions of decision/policy making processes and to their ability in managing different kinds and forms of knowledge that is relevant in participatory decision making. The great evidence of such a fail is related to the unsolved gap between decision making and deliberation. The idea of Open Content Systems (OCS) for E-governance, and in particular for democraticparticipation, derives from the need to reduce such a gap and is focused on the possibility to make knowledge and information created in rich participatory environments operative, as much as possible for deliberation. In particular, E-governance for environmental planning (at any scale urban or regional) can be partially improved if environments are supplied where cognitive richness, both explicit and tacit, can be managed within a complex organizational perspective. In this contribution we discuss that OCS can create such cognitive and organizational environments characterized by high dynamicity and evolving organizational virtual infrastructure.