Designing a platform to facilitate the development of virtual e-participation environments

Proposals regarding citizen participation in advisory and/or deliberative processes are still scarce in the e-democracy field, according to UNPAN report [8]. Exploiting social network groups with shared or common interests, can be an efficient way to promote participation. This work brings together guidelines based on software reuse techniques and social network concepts in a project to design a platform to facilitate the development of virtual environments with social networks characteristics for e-participation. This platform is based on a participation model called Government-Citizen Interactive Model.