An Open, Scalable and Distributed Platform for Public Discourse

A proposal for overcoming scalability, motivational and other limitations of using a single server as a participation platform is presented. The proposed solution is a distributed platform that makes use of existing publication channels and aggregates and indexes content using the XML-based RSS protocol. 1. Problem Statement One of the main issues in the field of e-democracy is how to best use information and communications technology to facilitate public consultation, deliberation, participation or “engagement” in policy-making processes such as urban planning. A variety of discourse systems for the World Wide Web have been developed for this purpose, such as GeoMed [Sch98], Zeno [GR02], and DEMOS [Lü01]. Typically, these are client-server systems with a three-tier architecture. On the server side there is a web application that stores articles and other information in a database. On the client side, participants in the process access the system using a web browser. There are a number of problems with this approach: Scalability. It is difficult to scale up to thousands of participants using replication and caching mechanisms, since many web pages need to be generated dynamically to provide personalized views and support the transactions needed for interaction and participation. Motivation. For several reasons, a centralized architecture inhibits large-scale participation. Participants need to access, learn and use a special purpose application, rather than being able to make contributions using some general purpose, familiar medium, comparable to a daily newspaper. Articles in a general-purpose publication are likely to reach a wider audience and typically have the advantage of being archived in public libraries for a long time. Finally, the marketing potential of publishers is not mobilized for the participation process when the articles are published only on a centralized participation server, rather as part of their own publications. Moderation Overhead. Since the articles are stored and published on the participation server, the providers of the server must take full responsibility for the published content.