Discourse Support Systems for Deliberative Democracy

The idea of deliberative democracy is to facilitate broad and deep public participation in systematic, constructive discourses about legislation and policy issue's, so as to enhance the legitimacy, efficiency, quality, acceptability and accountability of the political process. By discourse support systems we mean groupware designed to support structured, goal-directed discourses. The paper discusses the importance of discourse support systems for deliberative democracy, provides a brief overview of the Open Source Zeno system and mentions several e-democracy pilot applications of Zeno, including the DEMOS project of the European Union.