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1 Introduction
A long-established way for the general public to influence decision making is through initiating or supporting a petition. Petitioning is a simple yet effective tool that provides a direct route for citizens to bring an issue to the attention of a democratically-elected assembly, from Local Council to the European Parliament. E-petitioning systems have already been introduced in some EU Member States both at national and increasingly at local levels, exploiting internet capabilities in order to make it easier for petitioners to gather "signatures" for their petitions from geographically dispersed supporters.
One such e-petitioning system is being developed by the EuroPetition[1] consortium as a trans-European local authority service to facilitate "distributed citizen engagement"; this article draws extensively from [7] Cruickshank and Smith (2009) in describing the project context and research background. EuroPetition builds upon a proven open-source UK e-petitions system and the experience of the developers, and incorporates innovative and state-of-the-art Web 2.0 applications from the LEGESE[2] and CitizenScape[3] e-participation projects. EuroPetition is also intended to provide interaction with the European Parliament's Petitions (PETI) Committee, and with the European Commission's Citizens Initiative online procedures. The project aims to pilot trial the coordination and submission of cross-border and pan-European Citizen Initiatives and petitions in five regions in Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, potentially involving over 4.9 million citizens across the EU, aiming to strengthen and broaden citizens' participation in democratic decision making.
As EuroPetition will be used in a number of cross-border decision-making cases it will be relevant in promoting e-participation not only in the context of the Lisbon Treaty but also in many legislative and decision-making processes, so that the benefits of this e-participation could be also felt by the wider online community. EuroPetition incorporates social networking technologies and practices to add to the capacity and utility of the service. Online collaboration sites have been successful in recent years, especially among the young, and EuroPetition utilises various tools to enable people with similar interests to form groups which traverse social, administrative or geographic barriers, and help these groups to participate in decision making at a local, regional or EU level.
The project's high-level objectives can be summarised as to demonstrate the acceptability and take-up of the system over a period of...