Towards decision support for participatory democracy

In many parts of the world there is growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of Web-based group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly unsophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for decision support in this area and describe decision support functions that could be implemented in such a framework. We illustrate the ideas with a specific system to support participatory budget elaboration through the Web. Several practical issues are discussed along the way.