Plenary Lecture
Public Participatory Decision Making
Professor Love Ekenberg
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Stockholm University, Sweden
E-mail: lovek@dsv.su.se
Abstract: Within the realm of e-government, the development has moved towards testing new means for democratic decision-making, like e-panels, electronic discussion forums, and polls. Although such new developments seem promising, they are not problem free, and the outcomes are seldom used in the subsequent formal political procedures. Nevertheless, process models offer promising potential when it comes to structuring and supporting transparency of decision processes in order to facilitate the integration of the public into decision-making procedures in a reasonable and manageable way. Based on real-life cases of urban planning processes in Sweden, we present an outline for an integrated framework for public decision making to: a) provide tools for citizens to organize discussion and create opinions; b) enable governments, authorities, and institutions to better analyse these opinions; and c) enable governments to account for this information in planning and societal decision making by employing a process model for structured public decision making.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Love Ekenberg has a PhD in Computer and Systems Sciences as well as a PhD in Mathematics from Stockholm University. He is full Professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University visiting and Professor in Societal Planning and Environment at KTH - the Royal Institute of Technology. He has been working with various aspects of risk and decision analysis for a number of years and was formerly an advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Centre International de Déminage Humanitaire Genève, member of the Swedish advisory group to the UN ICT Task Force, WHO, World Bank and others. He has published well over 150 articles on formal methods, risk, decision analysis and eGovernment.