Report A “Roadmap for the delivery of eParticipation: lessons learned from the STEP project”

The Report is intended for Public Authorities working and delivering projects and activities in the area of e-Participation, with particular reference to young people. This document reconsiders a number of the outputs produced by STEP project and formalizes in a number of recommendations what has been learned during the execution of the STEP project.

Recommendations are offered around a framework for e-Participation composed of six steps which is based (and enhances) a framework proposed in the PanEuropean Best Practice Manual on e-Participation. The framework, together with the recommendations presented in the document, thus offer a reusable roadmap for Public Authorities wishing to conduct their own e-Participation processes.

The chapter “Framework and Recommendations for the delivery of e-Participation with Young People” is a particular highlight (p.11-p.31) as it aims to provide a high-level consultation reference to the pilot authorities when deciding how best to execute the pilot needs in environmental decision-making, clearly set out the principles and elements that the pilot authorities should use to implement the public participation via STEP platform, define the local pilot specifications and organize the pilot activities for each public authority, and identify the methods and the means to be followed in order to achieve successful pilots implementation.

The Horizon 2020 STEP project had as an aim to develop and pilot test a cloud e-Participation SaaS platform (step.green) enhanced with web / social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features, to promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decisionmaking process on environmental issues. During two years and a half of work, the STEP consortium has conducted research on e-Participation, it has designed and developed new tools and it has piloted these together with six Public Authorities in Europe.