In 2007 the Citizen's forum European Debates http://www.evropske-volitve.si received ePractice Editor's choice recognition (http://www.epractice.eu/en/cases/citizensforum07) as the first successful e-democracy experiment on Slovenia. The initiative was presented to the wider expert community at eChallenges 2007 conference & Exhibition in Den Haag the with an article Citizen's Forum: The first successful eDemocracy initiative in the Republic of Slovenia? (http://www.inepa.si/images/stories/citi ... -final.pdf). So far the Citizen's forum e-participation initiative received more that 1.000 post from citizens and 8 feedbacks regarding discussion reports from Slovenian members of the European parliament.

Short eParticipation iniative description:

A number of civil society e-participation projects has emerged in recent years in Slovenia, such as the Citizen's forum European Debates which aims at strengthening civil dialogue and utilize the internet to support participatory democracy at the European level. The Citizen's forum European Debates is current state of the art e-participation project in Slovenia (http://evropske-volitve.si/component/co ... le/64.html). The on-line forum is representing the Slovene use case for the VIDI project (Visualising the Impact of the legislation by analysing public DIscussions using statistical means) and is supported by the European Parliament Information Office Ljubljana. The Citizen's forum European debates is implemented, facilitated and administrated by the Institute for Electronic Participation. The aim of this on-line forum is twofold: (1) to provide a national public on-line deliberation space for facilitated debates and consultations on relevant European issues and (2) to establish a permanent on-line dialogue between Slovene public (citizens, NGOs , civil society) and European decision-making institutions (primarily Slovene members of the European parliament) on current EU policies and topics. The forum performance in the period from 17th of March until 20th of December 2009 included 501 forum posts, 17.416 unique visitors, 5 public discussions regarding European parliament performance and European elections, 2 public consultation with MEPs covering EU Employment issues and Climate change, 4 on-line polls with 751 votes, 3 facilitator's reports from on-line debate and on-line consultations, 24 feedbacks from the Slovene members of the European parliament and political parties candidates at the European elections, 104 friends on Facebook, 15 YouTube videos covering Citizen's forum debates and consultations and 7 on-line streamings with chat room covering Citizen's forum debates and consultations. The overall technical goal of the VIDI project is to develop various visualization techniques which can be applied in order to make knowledge emerging through the on-line discussion more explicit, transparent and useful for both policy-makers and citizens. Such techniques include visualization of both quantitative and qualitative data within and about the discussion. The visualization can show which topics are popular and how the interest changes in the time, i.e. how do they evolve over time. Moreover, such an analysis can show what people like and what dislike regarding the topics they are discussing about (a kind of sentiment analysis). The main advantage of the visualization is that it enables a multidimensional view on a discussion and not one-dimensional interpretation of its results. It is expected that the VIDI project will reinvigorate on-line forums as the key tool of electronic participation.

More information about the Institute for Electronic Participation: http://www.inepa.eu.