Keywords

1 Introduction

Democracy is a system of government where citizens exercise power through a voting process. In direct democracy , the citizens form a governing body and vote on every issue. In representative democracy , citizens elect representatives from among the electorate (those who are eligible to vote). Representatives form a government structure, such as parliament, which is responsible for passing laws that apply in a country, while laws are proposed by the government. In constitutional democracy, the dynamics of the majority restrict the majority and protect the minority through the exercise of specific rights, e.g., freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. In recent years, however, trust in politicians and political organizations has been put to test. Citizens perceive politics as an arena where conflicting forces are involved in the pursuit of their own interests that do not reflect the needs of the majority. This has given rise to political cynicism, i.e., the feeling of lack of public confidence in politicians and the political system. Citizens perceive political cynicism as distrust of the sincerity, integrity, and intentions of political authorities, political personnel, and political institution, which do not live up to the expectations of the electorate, leading to a lack of trust.

Some political theorists (Habermas, 1996, 1987) argue that a more deliberative democracy would be an antidote to the problems of a conventional electoral democracy. Citizens who are invited to participate in a deliberation to formulate public policies, under an environment that ensures equal participation, mutual understanding, and at the same time the presentation of substantiated views, are very likely to contribute positively to bridging different views. In addition, in this way, it is very likely to produce political decisions that are more consensual, logical, and fair.

One definition of public deliberation could be:

… is the dynamic process of dialogue between individuals or groups, based upon a genuine exchange of views, with the objective of influencing decisions, policies, or programmes of action. (Institute, 2004)

…a local attempt to seek the views of a broad constituency of persons. User involvement is a local attempt to include organized groups of service users in the planning, and occasionally the management, of such services. (Harrison & Mort, 2003).

1.1 What Is and What Is Not E-Deliberation

E-deliberation is an online deliberation process that uses Internet to sense public opinion on one or more specific issues, to enable and enhance discussion among citizens, and to shape consent among citizens. E-deliberation introduces the use of computers and communication technologies in meeting procedures and complements existing practices. E-deliberation can be an effective tool for encouraging participation and gathering answers to consultation papers and social policy issues as part of a wider range of methodologies (Triantafyllou, et al., 2019).

E-participation is an umbrella term for a set of e-democracy actions, like e-petitions and e-voting. Yet, it is important to clear out that e-deliberation refers to the process of formulating a common statement, rather than selecting predefined solutions.

2 E-Deliberation Systems

2.1 System Categories

Depending on the subject of the deliberation and the objectives, the profile, and the experience of the participants and coordinators in relevant processes, but also the general characteristics of the environment in which all this takes place, different categories of e-deliberation systems can be used.

2.1.1 Online Forums

It is used for large-scale public discussions and consultations, especially when it is desirable to involve many people in a discussion at the same time. They can be used for information and for discussion—debate on an issue as well as for deciding by voting. These methods and tools apply to a relatively large number of people, and the technology they use includes e-voting, text messaging, online polls, etc. Thus, it is possible to engage many people in the same place and at the same time.

2.1.2 Deliberative Poll

The selection of samples is random but representative of the citizens. There is a discussion, during which all opinions are presented. The positive aspect is that there is a thorough presentation of views and that the community is also involved through the transmission of media. The disadvantage, however, is that it does not create the feeling of wide participation but also requires a lot of time from those involved. In the poll process, there is no need for special anonymity as it can also be done in real time and constantly monitor the results. The deliberative poll is used specially to form an opinion.

2.1.3 Votes

E-deliberations voting is usually part of deliberations where, after information is given and since they can highlight the most interesting and relevant views on the issues, it is achieved to combine voting and deliberation. This has the effect of creating an audience with a high level of interest and better information about the subject under discussion than the actual citizens (Fishkin & Luskin, 2004). In most deliberations votes, the impact on the course of public policy is indirect and difficult to exploit. The hope here is to influence public opinion, to have an impact on policymaking beyond those who show interest in such issues and processes (Luskin, et al., 1999).

2.1.4 Discussion

The deliberative discussion method was developed with the aim of creating means to attract people and communities for dialog with each other. In essence, a deliberative discussion asks participants to discuss and weigh the costs and implications of a variety of solution options to a public problem (Goodin & Stein, 2008).

2.1.5 Questionnaires (E-Surveys)

By creating structured questionnaires by experts, depending on the topic, it is possible for everyone to participate, anonymously or by name. Bulk participation is a positive of e-surveys as structured discussions are achieved in large groups but also easy to implement in a multilingual environment. The analysis of the results is easy and immediate but can also give long-term results. Great attention should be paid to the questions, but the answers should be relatively simple; it is also possible that not all opinions are necessarily heard.

2.1.6 E-Petitions

A public e-petition refers to a petition published on a public network. The actual petition text can also be amended with additional background information concerning the petition issue and/or the different procedural steps related to the submitted petition. In addition, the final decision, important in terms of transparency, may be published.

2.2 Main E-Deliberation Systems

The most widely used e-deliberation systems deployed worldwide can be summarized in the following section.

2.2.1 E-Dialogos

The project (e-dialogos, 2012) concerns the provision of an innovative and fully developed methodology and e-democracy platform for the citizens of the Municipality of Trikala who will participate in the decision-making processes of the city, combining online discussions and voting procedures. The innovation of the project lies in its holistic and integrated approach to e-democracy and e-participation.

2.2.2 CrowdLaw

With proper planning, participation could help improve both the legitimacy and effectiveness of the legislative process at every stage, by introducing more data and ensuring that legislation is better informed (Noveck, 2018). The potential benefits at each stage are as follows:

  • Setting the agenda: when parliaments decide what issues to take on and legislate

  • Proposal: when legislative and regulatory bodies come to the substance

  • Drafting: when legislators announce solutions through legislation, regulation, or drafting of constitutions

  • Implementation: when the legislature instructs administrative bodies or staff to translate the law into practice

  • Evaluation: when the public can assist in overseeing and monitoring the results of legislation

2.2.3 Cornell E-Rulemaking Initiative

Groups such as the Cornell E-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI) have focused on research into how technologies such as Web 2.0 can help enhance public participation in the political process, specifically in Federal Service rules. In 2009, CeRI launched the RegulationRoom.org website. The site, hosted by the Legal Information Institute, is an independent nongovernmental online community that allows users to read, comment, and discuss proposed regulations from federal agencies (CornelleRulemakingInitiative, 2017).

2.2.4 MiSenado

It is a mobile phone app, available on iOS and Android devices. Via the app, users have access to attendance and voting records for all their elected representatives. Push notifications alert users to when live plenary sessions are scheduled to occur so that they can provide their feedback and vote on bills in real time (Senado, 2018).

2.2.5 ParlementetCitoyens

It is a platform that enables the French public to provide data on legislation through a multistage, online consultation process. From the platform, delegates can host a consultation consisting of three to five different participation opportunities. The consultation processes, while funded by the representatives present throughout the process, are run by volunteers (Rozenberg & Viktorovitch, 2014).

2.2.6 E-Democracia

It is a participation platform managed by HackerLab that provides the Brazilian public with three participation opportunities:

  • Collaborative drafting of legislative texts through WikiLegis

  • Involvement with members in a discussion board (Expressao)

  • Open to the public through online conferences with representatives

Through its tools, E-Democracia allows citizens to propose and draft legislation with multiple opportunities for government. The final reports ensure that citizens understand how and when their platform activity updated the bill (E-Democracia, 2016).

2.2.7 LiquidFeedback

An open-source software that supports Internet platforms, LiquidFeedback is a unique democracy software used by municipalities, political parties, associations, social movements, private organizations, and companies. It facilitates a comprehensive consultation process to empower citizens, members, and employees to participate in democratic decisions important to their organizations. LiquidFeedback promotes democratic participation and self-organization to redefine the future of society. LiquidFeedback offers a completely transparent decision-making process. Predefined rules and times ensure that all steps in the process are made public in real time. Decisions are made by registered ballot only, and all relevant data is available to all participants in human and computer readable formats (Behrens, et al., 2014).

2.2.8 DebateHub

DebateHub is an open, online, collaborative tool to support deliberation and democratic decision-making. DebateHub has a very simple user interface, which may look like a common web forum, but is enhanced by a semantic data model. This allows for better up-to-date brainstorming support, as well as the development of advanced analytics for a team, discussion, and challenge data, which is delivered with a visualization control panel. This system also has moderator functions to reduce the repetition of ideas in an online chat, which is one of the main weaknesses of existing online platforms for ideas and discussions (Quinto, et al., 2021).

2.2.9 OnlineConsultationPlatform (GR0059)

The online consultation platform will serve as a key reference point for the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes of the Municipality of Thessaloniki and will support the implementation of the organization’s strategy for the transformation of Thessaloniki into an integrated, participatory platform. It will launch a new framework for discussion with citizens, empowering and empowering them throughout the project, and will be a key element of the broader initiative on disseminating the benefits of e-democracy (Anon., 2018).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Comparison among common e-deliberation systems

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2.2.10 Decidim

Decidim (decidim, 2019) is a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely on free software. More specifically, Decidim is a web environment produced in Ruby on Rails, which allows users to create and configure a website platform or portal, which will be used in the form of a social network for democratic participation. The portal allows each organization (local council, association, university, NGO, trade union, neighborhood, or cooperative) to create democratic processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative planning, urban planning, and elections. It also allows personal meetings to be organized and signed, minutes to be posted, agenda items to be proposed, and results notifications to be received.

There are three levels of authentication that indicate how anonymous users are or are not. The first concerns systems that are completely open to authentication and can be accessed as many times as users want. The second concerns the systems with which they somehow identify the users, but without much information, but to have access only once in this way (e.g., by phone number). And the third concerns the systems with which they identify users, with a lot of important information. Degree of connection with the legislation has to do with how much each system is related to the legislation. The rating is from 0 to 100.

The comparison of the aforementioned systems, in terms of citizen identification and connection to legislation, is presented in Fig. 1. About the degree of connection to legislation, we have taken under consideration two aspects: (i) the capacity of the system to produce a final e-deliberation report which can act as an enabler to a legislation process and (ii) the number of e-deliberation projects that reached, at some point, to a legislation form. For example, e-dialogos is equipped with a final report functionality, but no e-deliberation projects (to the best of our knowledge) have reached to a legal form. On the other hand, MiSenado’s final reports have affected many documented legislation processes.

As far as the degree of the citizens to the final output metric, it refers to both tools (e.g., discussion forums) and e-deliberation models which can facilitate the evolvement of a proposal. More specifically, a system which just presents proposals and citizens can only vote their preferable proposal will receive a score 0 at this specific metric, while a system which promotes comments discussion and integration, proposals’ merging, and other collaboration actions will receive a score 100. Therefore, Decidim has received a high score in this metric, while Crowd-low a low one.

3 “Smart Cities” Need E-Deliberation and E-Deliberation Needs “Smart Citizens”

3.1 “Smart Citizens ”

In the past few years, the term “smart city has taken over research, academia, policy, and industry by building and deploying digital technologies, networks, and urban governance (Marvin, et al., 2015). While it has been initially proposed as an agenda for designing, developing, and deploying ICT products, “smart city” embraced more broad concepts for digitally enabled urbanism, equipped for nowadays city challenges like mobility, sustainability, and green policies. However, materializing and deploying concepts for smart cities, public authorities and other relative stakeholders need to come to a “moral” agreement with the citizens: in what extent citizens are familiar with the “smart city” technologies, their rights, and their obligations in this digitalized world (Kitchin, et al., 2019). Subsequently, a smart city requires a “smart citizen”: a willing subject in digitally shaped urban governance, infrastructure, and services (Joss, et al., 2017). A smart citizen is usually registered to a set of networks and services while utilizing hardware devices (e.g., sensors, webcams, etc.) (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018). Yet, the participation of smart citizens to e-participation platforms (such as e-deliberation, e-voting, e-comment, etc.) has the potential for the citizens not only to consume digital goods but also produce utilization, in terms of engagement with the public administration. A growing market in e-participation platforms, initiated by public authorities, multinationals and academia enable citizens to debate, propose, comment, vote, and contribute to urban strategy and local plans. Yet, criticism has emerged that such initiatives implemented within an incurably neoliberal smart citizenship are mostly tokenistic (Kitchin, et al., 2019).

Smart citizenship or the smart city bordering of the involved technology has been reported widely (Rabari & Storper, 2015). For example, usage of sensing devices across city infrastructures and integration of platforms that connect and utilize these data sources (also produced by citizens via their cell phones) by smart city managers can produce useful analytics, like visualization of urban phenomena in real time. Governance transforms mainly to a managerial process, i.e., digital tools and services provide neutral means for meeting seemingly universal and legitimate actions of efficiency for sustainable and modest cities. While the smart city challenge is mostly technical, transforming complex urban processes to platform functionalities (Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017), the smart citizen challenge is more complex. Citizens not only have to acquire the necessary digital literacy but also to possess the knowledge of the power the e-participation platforms have.

Recently, various authors have argued that one of the criticisms of smart city discourse concerns how e-governance is effectively ceded to public-private corporations conquered by the trade technology interests who install, own, and deploy e-participation platforms and whose authoritative presence imposes a particular computational logic upon the city (Vanolo, 2016). Criticism of platform technocracy explores the assumptions stored into digital platforms, and it challenges the values privileged in so-called “technical” decisions that obfuscate the real politics of those decisions (Gillespie, 2010). The smart city is projected as the latest brand for neoliberal urban political economy, deploying digital technologies to materialize competitiveness, inward investment, economic productivity, and efficiency (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2014). Smart services are criticized for enhancing corporate technology priorities, urban entrepreneurship, and imperatives in capital accumulation, at the expense of citizenship rights and democracy to the smart city (Kitchin, et al., 2019).

Smart citizenship promotion can be realized, even partly, as legitimacy-seeking responses to smart city criticism. Citizen e-participation platforms become an appealing road for smart city managers seeking to cultivate active citizens. A business market has been set up, developing online citizen participation services. These industry providers expose participation as a circumscribed service: running citizen e-deliberation and voting services for clients, who receive data analysis and reports (Graeff, 2018). Consistent with the smart city, vendors of these services are contracted to provide a uniform technological template for citizen participation. There have been some research works though, which indicates that the democratic capacity of these platforms needs scrutiny in terms of their ability to actively challenge power (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019). Studies of smart citizen policies and projects find citizen inclusion to be a shallow invitation (Vanolo, 2016). Initiatives envisage citizens as either passive, compliant participants in each process or, at best, entrepreneurial contributors to smart services (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018). Active, autonomous citizenship is largely absent. Unfortunately, most of the e-participation platforms treat citizens passively, by developing functionalities which steer end users to specific pathways. If there is civic engagement, it is in the form of a participant who provides feedback or suggestions, rather than being a proposer, cocreator, decision-maker, or leader. Motivation is not considered as citizenship, let alone democracy, but rather self-interested acknowledgement from developers of the benefits of user-centered design in the successful implementation of digital technology projects. Questions about control, representation, participation, and democracy remain unaddressed (de Hoop, et al., 2019).

3.2 Models of Participatory Democracy

Governments and politicians recognize the worth of e-participation (Bryson, et al., 2013), but usually their narrative usually fails to define what the outcome of participation should be. Several models and frameworks have been proposed to frame the output of e-participation processes and more specifically e-deliberation processes. (Held, 2006) identifies almost ten different models of democracy. While these models differ from each other, they all converge on a set of democratic principles: free elections, freedom of speech, inclusive citizenship, freedom to form and become members of organizations, and the rule of law. (Päivärinta & Sæbø, 2006) presented four models of democracy, categorizing e-participation into two pillars: agenda setting (citizens or public authorities set the agenda) and decision-making (citizens or public authorities have the final decision). Authors stress the importance of clearing out the model of democracy being followed at the beginning of a citizen e-deliberation (or e-participation in general) project and that this should be communicated to participants to avoid confusion about the outcome of the discussion.

Attempting to become “smart cities,” public authorities are embracing various technologies that promise opportunities for increasing participation by expanding access to public comment and deliberation. Yet, stakeholders have encountered the problem of defining participation, determining who is able to participate through technology-enhanced public engagement.

3.3 Benefits of E-Participation in Smart Cities

The increasing penetration of ICT technologies has enabled e-participation platforms to be integrated in several smart cities and for several purposes. As part of e-democracy, e-participation can offer the following benefits:

  • Focus on citizen needs: e-participation, mostly through e-deliberation platforms, provides to citizens the opportunity to express their opinions and formulate their actual needs.

  • Government transparency: through open government initiatives, public authorities offer citizens access to government information.

  • Citizen involvement: digital democracy platforms provide a tangible mean for citizens to actively involve to public issues and to public authorities to provide systematic information updates and official meetings and/or ask for citizens’ involvement in activities regarding the local government.

For e-deliberation (and e-participation platforms in general) to act in the heart of a smart city and constitute the base of every governing activity, the remarks should be enhanced. Thus, both government policies and the legislative decision-making process should be transformed properly, aiming to increase the online participation and the relative data and information being shared with a significant reduced cost and in an easier manner (Matei & Savulescu, 2014). Along with this process, the role that the citizens have regarding public services’ delivery can be changed from one of a passive service beneficiary to one of an active informed partner (Sherriff, 2015).

4 PODS: A Generic Approach for E-Deliberation in Smart Cities

The formulation of an integrated approach to online deliberation led to the design and implementation of the PODS (Public On-line Deliberation System) . As described in (Triantafyllou, et al., 2019), the system comprises four functional modules, which materialize the components of the different PODS models .

  • Information base. The information base is the primary functional module where all data are stored and retrieved from, through the deliberation process. These data include personal information of the participants (proposers and citizens), such as name, address, gender, age, identity, expertise, social profile, and other relevant information which are used to infer (during the deliberation process) the most prevalent proposals/suggestions/comments.

  • Discussion forum. The deliberation utilizes a type of electronic forum through which participants can express their opinions and engage in the dialog and exchange of opinions between them. Certain rules of civilized dialog are applied to ensure equal opportunities of participation, encourage involvement of citizens who are reluctant to express themselves, and limit those who tend to monopolize the debate. These rules are known ex ante, and compliance to these rules is the responsibility of an independent adjudicator, the debate moderator.

  • Evaluation process. Evaluation of the proposals is based on a compound procedure that highlights winning proposals such as positive, negative, neutral votes, and social factors (citizens’ digital reputation, participation frequency and innovation, geolocation, etc.). After a number of consequent rounds, where proposals with low acceptance are discarded or proposals with similar context can be merged, a set of “winning proposals” are surfaced.

  • Deliberation authority . A governing body monitors the deliberation process, and it is responsible for setting up the criteria and coefficients to be used by the evaluation procedure to facilitate the screening process toward awarding the “winning proposals.” The criteria and coefficients introduce the “political view” of local authorities.

As depicted in Fig. 2, the PODS involves three types of users:

  • Deliberation authorities. These include all authorities that introduce a deliberation. The PODS is mainly addressed to authorities (local council, public bodies or groups, management executives, etc.) that need to deliberate on an issue allowing the participants/citizens to express their opinions and evaluate possible proposals.

  • Proposers . Any citizen can present a proposal about the issue introduced for deliberation. The proposers present their proposal including any documentation needed to support their thesis and are responsible to work with other proposers to merge their proposition because of the evaluation procedure.

  • Citizens . The citizens formulate a closed set of individuals that participate in the deliberation process based on their identity (citizens, interested people, members of a specific group, etc.). Each participant logs in using credentials, and the user inserts all data at relevant fields that correspond to relevant criteria and factors the authority body believes should be a part of the evaluation procedure.

Fig. 2
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PODS conceptual architecture

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Compared to the work published in (Triantafyllou, et al., 2019), in the past 2 years, several developments have been introduced to the PODS system, aiming to improve the deliberation process. These developments mainly include analytics for encouraging proposers to take under consideration the citizens’ comments, thus emphasizing on building proposals with higher levels of consensus. More specifically, two analytics are automatically calculated for each proposal, facilitating the deliberation process:

  • Proposal plasticity index . This analytic refers to the degree a proposal has changed compared to the initial submission of the proposal. A document comparison algorithm (hybrid implementation of the Jaccard score (Temma, et al., 2019) and the BERT model (Nogueira, et al., 2019)) is applied to the working version of the proposal, compared to the initial proposal, and the result is presented to the citizens. Following this rationale, citizens can “judge” a proposal for its evolvement through the deliberation process. Thus, PODS encourages the proposers to make changes, alterations, and improvements to their proposal, facilitating the integration of opinions and aspects not included at the initial proposal.

  • Comments integration index . The comments integration index is a quantification of how many comments have been taken under consideration by the proposer. The index is affected by two actions. The first action is the reply of the proposer to a comment, until the communication chain (replies on comments by both the proposer and a citizen) is characterized as resolved by the citizen. The second action is the incorporation of a comment into a proposal, after it is verified by the citizen who posed the comment. It is obvious that the more comments are either addressed or incorporated in the proposal, the higher this analytic will be.

These analytics are visible for all citizens who participate in the deliberation process, providing quantitatively insight about the evolvement of the proposal toward embracing more opinions and improving through the deliberation process.

In terms of the technological aspects, PODS utilizes REST APIs for integrating with external user repositories, to provide secure user authentication. For data storage, PODS follows a hybrid approach, integrating a no-SQL database (mongo-DB) for storing material related to the proposals and the users’ comments and a relational database for storing the system settings, the produced analytics, and other information related to the deployed deliberation setups.

The PODS evaluation process designed and implemented a model which is presented below. All phases are time constrained, meaning each phase is complete into a specified time frame, different for each theme deliberation.

  • Initialization . The system administrator initiates the system by providing relevant information about the participants (name, location information, expertise, relevance, participation frequency, digital reputation, etc.). The above information is used by the system to ensure access to eligible participants (citizens of a specific local community, members of a social group, etc.) and by the authorities that have ordered the deliberation which need to set up the parameters and factors that will be used throughout the evaluation process to point out the “winning proposals.”

  • Theme post . The deliberation authority sets up a concept/problem/issue that is of interest to the local government. Any registered user can introduce a theme into the PODS system. The authority can issue from time-to-time calls inviting any interested individual to propose a theme for discussion. The theme is included in a list after approval of the deliberation authority. A list of active themes is always available to the users.

  • Proposal post . In this phase, every participant can participate by introducing for each theme a proposal. All proposals with relevant documentation are displayed under a proposal list that is attached to each theme. For a large-scale deliberation scenario (e.g., a theme that concerns a country), the deliberation authority can choose to pose a pre-theme post phase. During this phase, the writers of the proposals shape their suggestion and invite other users to support it. A proposal passes to the next phase only if it gathers an adequate number of supporters (the exact threshold is defined during the initialization phase by the deliberation authority). Following this workflow, only mature-enough proposals enter the evaluation phase.

    • Evaluation phase . This phase is the core of the system. It includes three major steps:

    • Vote on a proposal. Each participant can cast a vote on a proposal. Although in certain electoral systems participants may be allowed to cast multiple votes, a citizen/participant can cast only a single vote. The total number of votes corresponds to the number of citizens who evaluate a given proposal, to any given proposal a positive, negative, or neutral vote, respectively. Each proposal can be evaluated based on the measure of acceptance where proposals having sufficient positive attraction are considered as candidates to qualify to the next phase. Participants can add comments, add relevant documentation supporting their vote, or suggest proposal merging.

    • Proposal merging is a process where participants indicate proposals that seem similar in context and the relevant proposers are to encourage them to present a new proposal because of the comments of the participants. Proposers are notified if their proposal is recommended for “merging.” The completely voting process follows the basic principles applied by all voting systems (Bouras, et al., 2003).

    • Application of political analytics to be used for evaluating the proposal submitted either by the local government or by citizens. The general principles behind any realistic implementation of political analytics are presented in (Drakopoulos, et al., 2018) and are set either by the participants or the local government (based on political decisions). The decision criteria and factors should be transparent to users to reinforce a culture of openness and accountability.

    • After the rating and acceptability phases, the remaining proposals are inserted back in the evaluation phase until a winning proposal pops up and is publicized.

  • Rating phase . The proposals are rated. The system displays at least the number of votes per proposal, the criteria and factors used to rank proposals, and the way the proposals were merged or rejected. The results are presented categorized by various criteria.

  • Acceptability phase . This a repetitive phase which pops up the “winning proposals.” At each round, the last ranked proposal is deleted, and a new round begins with the remaining proposals graded by the participants and is ranked according to their acceptance between individuals. The cycle ends when a winning proposal surfaces having the majority of acceptance between individuals.

  • Publication phase . At this phase, the outvoted proposal is presented. The proposal is accompanied by documented information that can be used by the local government in supporting the relevant proposal. Today, factors such as education, work experience, religious views, political alignment, exposure to social media, and family size play an important yet unconscious role in daily decision-making. The whole process is based on a repetitive schema, which is composed of consecutive rounds. Each round after evaluating and grading results in a set of acceptable proposals. The last proposal graded is deleted and a new round is introduced. The new round includes remaining proposals (undeleted) of new proposals (resulting from the merging process). After several rounds a final outvoted proposal surfaces and it is presented.

The final proposal is presented accompanied with all relevant documentation to the authority and the decision-makers. Decision-makers have access to the whole process data which can be used for further review. Figure 3 represents the process workflow which denotes the interaction between users and processes.

Fig. 3
figure 3

PODS working flow

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Comparing PODS architecture with the systems presented in the previous sections, it is important to mention that the design philosophy behind PODS does not target to sort out a “winning” proposal or opinion. On the other hand, PODS drives its users, through the merging phase, to cooperate, formulating entirely new proposals. Thus, the main objective of PODS is to create consensus among citizens, which at the end of the day is the outmost scope, for materializing the content of the deliberation outcome, and provide sustainability to smart cities’ prosper living.

5 Conclusion

Digitally literate people constitute an important part of the society, as it is the part of the society which uses to a higher extent ICT in all aspects of life. These proportion of citizens form the society based on performance and information usage; thus, they usually are also the part of the society, which have higher participatory percentages to e-participation initiatives. Nevertheless, no citizen should be put aside from being a beneficiary of e-deliberation platforms. E-democracy demands smart cities to include in their policymaking and decision-making processes all citizens with the right to vote, by offering them equal and just access to public information, giving them the possibility to interact in a faster and easier way with public authorities and to have an impact on their activities. Higher and direct participation of citizens provides to a smart city the potential to become fair, supportive, and sustainably innovative. Thus, smart cities need to provide opportunities for increased awareness and access to e-participation platforms in such a manner that no individual be at disadvantage.

To conclude, an informed and participatory society means a strong society, a society able to contribute to the achievement of a true democracy. Through its participation, the society can help authorities to meet the public administration’s general objective, namely, to respond to citizens’ needs and requirements. By e-participating, citizens also offer support to public authorities and governments for them to carry out their duties in a more efficient manner, thus creating a closer relationship between all actors involved. This all results in a more uniform and thus more powerful state on a regional, local, and national level, a state in whose composition we can encounter smart cities. Finally, for the next generations of smart-cities, it is mandatory to educate “smart citizens” with skills not only for consuming smart services but also with the appropriate skills and state-of-mind to use technology to make their cities a better place to live. E-deliberation, especially through a “consensus-driven” platform, is a remarkable mean for enhancing participation of citizens in management and micromanagement of a smart city.