The openDCN platform

The openDCN software environment -- where DCN stands for Deliberative Community Networks – provides on-line dedicated tools to support participation and deliberation.

openDCN aims at promoting citizens participation and at linking citizens to their institutions and other decision makers with information products, a communication framework and, finally, an on-line deliberative space capable to involve them in the decision-making process, i.e. to define and put in action initiatives in the field of governance policies and sustainable development for their territory.

The goal of the openDCN project is to enhance the effectiveness of participative processes by conceiving, designing and implementing a socio-technical, computer-enabled, trusted environment for e-participation and fostering the evolution of the classic community-network concept into a new consultative-deliberative paradigm.

In particular, openDCN consists of two main interrelated spaces:

• the community space, aimed at fostering public dialog on civic issues and facilitating the rise of mutual trust between participants through free discussions. From a technical point of view, community space may consist of various tools: public forums (the core of every online community), newsletters, news boards, event calendars, and blogs;

• the deliberation space to foster the creation of a shared vision position among the participants, i.e., to finalize a deliberative process in order to produce a well defined outcome. Deliberation space makes up the core of the participatory system; participatory processes consist of a series of deliberation stages, each relying on a different participatory modality and involving different participants. This therefore calls for outright structured participatory processes, divided into clearly distinct phases, each of which relies on a specific deliberation tool. Despite their differences, all the deliberation tools share three architectural functionalities: identifying the actors, framing the issue, and producing a shared position that summarizes the outcome of the deliberation process. Each module manages these three constituents independently from one another. For example, there are likely to be more actors identified for a voting session than those who speak out on a technical panel. The platform therefore supports redistributing the participants of each module into groups with different roles.

An informational space (aimed at facilitating sharing and collection of information provided by citizens to support group activities) is integrated in both the others two spaces.

The various phases are combined in a single structured participatory process: the process-building module, also called the Agenda.