E² participation: electronically empowering citizens for social innovation through agreement technologies

Following the open government trend and based on its three principles -- collaboration, transparency and participation; participation initiatives are been conducted by many governments around the world. Despite the wide range and variety of such initiatives, most of them face a common technical challenge -- lack of technical tools to automatically summarize stakeholders' opinions and discussions. Addressing the challenge, this paper introduces a new concept on e-Participation research -- Electronic Empowerment (E²) Participation, a new approach to automatically identify collective thinking patterns in e-Participation initiatives. The concept was coined as part of a multi-disciplinary research project aiming at integrating Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering techniques and tools with Electronic Governance models and principles to design innovative tools for e-Participation. Since our research work is at its early stages, the main contribution of this paper is introducing the E² Participation concept and outlining a framework for its implementation.