JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 17(14): 1931-1950, doi: 10.3217/jucs-017-14-1931
Enabling Crowd Participation in Governmental Decision-making
expand article infoAna Cristina B. Garcia‡, Adriana S. Vivacqua§, Thiago C. Tavares|
‡ Universidade Federal Fluminense,, Niteroi, Brazil§ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil| Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, Brazil

Corresponding author: Ana Cristina B. Garcia ( bicharra@ic.uff.br )

© Ana Cristina B. Garcia, Adriana Vivacqua, Thiago Tavares.
This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License.
Citation: Garcia ACB, Vivacqua AS, Tavares TC (2011) Enabling Crowd Participation in Governmental Decision-making. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 17(14): 1931-1950. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-017-14-1931
Open Access
Abstract
Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of their citizens' needs to make appropriate decisions that reflect the overall wishes and needs of the population. However, except for mandatory voting scenarios, a low rate of citizen participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Brazil's participatory budget policy emphasizes people's direct guidance regarding certain budget allocations though group meetings. This paper presents mParticipation, an agent-based model for eliciting and answering citizen demands in a participatory government structure using mobile technology. A prototype system applied to the domain of public budget allocation domain demonstrates that it is feasible to provide effective computational support to participatory collective decision-making.
Keywords
m-Government, mobile interaction, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, participatory decision-making, m-Democracy