Modeling of a Democratic Citizenship Community to Facilitate the Consultative and Deliberative Process in the Web

Electronic democracy should facilitate the discussion and participation of citizens as well as electronic voting in governmental issues. Governmental applications available in the Web have not evolved significantly toward real participation of citizens. The implementation of an e-democracy system can benefit from incorporating features from distinct information channels, especially television. This paper discusses an Interactive Government-Citizen Model that allows and stimulates the decision-making process between government and citizens, facilitating citizen participation through a virtual community and through integrated management of information in the Web environment. In this Model we identify the phases of an consultation and deliberative process as carried out through a Democratic Citizenship Community, the discussion of which is structured in a Government-Citizen Interaction Language known as DemIL. The degree of maturity initially proposed is structured in four levels: acceptance, participation, decision and maturity. In order to measure the degree of maturity, by levels, we use a set of indicators, for later construction of an evaluation tool.