Nowadays, we can see that the development of e-democracy is taking an important value around the world, as a way in which the local authorities can be more in contact of the citizens. An example of this development is “e-dialogos”, an innovative and fully fledged e-Democracy online platform for the citizens of the City of Trikala in Greece to participate in the decision-making processes of the city.
In fact, the objective is to offer the citizens the chance to get actively involved in the development of city policies in an on-line platform of dialogue and participation, and also to give the citizens real trust in their elected representatives, in order to reverse their disengagement regarding them.This platform comprises three tools that are very important and mutually supported:

a) the Electronic Surveys (e-Voting) are managed by the Municipality and they deploy questionnaires in the website to gather the opinions of the citizens as an input to find out about their satisfaction regarding the city policies;
b) e-Signatures, which imply different petitions that are filled online by the citizens and submitted to the Municipality, in order to be discussed by the council (if the signatures gathered are over the minimum required);
c) e-deliberation is the innovative aspect of the project because it is a set of interrelated tools that includes: the information about all the issues that the citizens will discuss and the use of an “e-forum” that allows a practical exchange of information and opinions, in order to vote online (use of the platform e-voting) about the topics that are being discussed directly.

It is important to note that the citizens who participate must be subscribed in the platform. e-Dialogos was implemented in 2007 using external outsourcing for the technical and methodological development. It is a combination of different disciplines (software architecture knowledge management, project management, political sciences, communication strategies, etc.) that finally built an innovative website that allows the interactive participation of the residents.

At the end of 2009, the project was a finalist of 4th European eGovernment Awards into the category of eGovernment Empowering Citizens. If you’ are interested in finding more about this platform, just enter the project’s website: http://www.edialogos.gr/edialogos_en.htm