iLeger is a web platform that aims to improve interaction between candidates and citizens during electoral periods by encouraging citizen participation, narrowing the gap between citizens and politicians, and fostering debate. It allows citizens to raise questions to candidates, propose ideas, and express opinions through polls. It was tested during Portuguese elections in 2009 and 2011, attracting over 23,000 unique visitors during the 2011 presidential elections. The platform aims to improve transparency and accountability through continuous online dialogue between elections.

1. iLeger: A Web Based Application for Participative Elections Pedro Agante Libertrium pedroagante@libertrium.com Luís Borges Gouveia University Fernando Pessoa lmbg@ufp.edu.pt Artur Afonso Sousa PolytechnicInstituteof Viseu ajas@di.estv.ipv.pt 2011 – Delft, Holland

2. Improve interaction between candidates and citizens during the electoral period. Encourage citizen participation Narrowthe gap between citizens and politicians Foster debate, deliberation and knowledge sharing Project Objectives

3. What is iLeger? Web platform that joins the key stakeholders in an election and allows the creation and management of multiple participation events.

4. Questions from the community Citizens raise questions, in previously defined topics, simultaneously to all candidates. Candidates answer the best questions. Citizenscomparesidebyside the answers from different candidates to the same question.

5. Proposals and ideas from the community Gather the ideas from the community to solve the problemsondifferenttopicsofgovernance. Encourage citizens to expose what they would do if they were the candidates and highlight the best ideas.

6. The opinion of the community - Polls Invite citizens to express their views on key issues of the election.

7. Live debates Create an open dialogue between citizens and candidates or representatives of the candidatures.

8. Platform Management Manage user and editorial content through a dedicated backoffice. Main features: Management of participation events Content management User management Moderation

9. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections 23512 unique visitors and 947 distinct users who have logged in. logged in unique visitors ratio ≈ 4% The editor accepted 187 of the 253 questions and 181 of the 201 ideas proposed by the users Rejection rate of 10%

10. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections Fromthe 23512 uniquevisitors, 9862 entered iLeger for the first time during live debates. Great interest of citizens to participate in live events of short duration Fromthe 23512 uniquevisitors, 845 usersactively interacted (written content and voting) with iLeger 3.5% of unique visitors actively participating in iLeger

11. The 2011 Portuguese Presidential Elections Fromthe947 distinct users who have logged in, 845 usersactively interacted (written content and voting) with iLeger 89% of the users that logged in, actively participated in iLeger All the six candidatures were invited to join and participate in iLeger and all of them accepted

12. iLeger – Timeline September 2009 – ParlamentaryElectionsin Portugal (testVersion) October 2009 – Local Electionsin Portugal (testinVISEU) October 2010 – PartnershipPortugal Telecom Portal - SAPO December2010 – Elections for HeadofthePortugueseMedicalAssociation January 2011 - PortuguesePresidentialElections

13. Conclusions Candidates are well aware of the current momentum in Internet-based social networks and dedicate more and more financial and humanresources for transmitting their messages across the electorate through Web channels. From the experience gather during the 2011 Portuguese presidential election we can conclude that publicity is a key factor in this kind of initiatives. Webelieve that continuous dialogue may also improve citizen trust and accountability of politicians, although more research is needed to confirm this assumption.

14. Future Work Support for candidate-staff workflow Incorporate comments in the section dedicated to citizen polls to foster deliberation about the issues under discussion Implement citizen reputation schemes Develop notification mechanism on updates Display charts with statistical information derived from the contents of iLeger

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