A Collaboration Pattern Language for eParticipation: a Strategy for Reuse

Abstract

Collaborative Web technologies make it possible for the geographically dispersed citizens to participate in the government's decision making. The challenge is, however, to choose suitable technologies that meet the requirements of eParticipation. This paper proposes a collaboration pattern language as a new approach to designing architecture for eParticipation systems. Such a language canserve as a guidance to help the designers of the eParticipation systems to choose suitable collaborative technologies. The proposed pattern language is based on the work in the areas of collaboration engineering and software engineering, and is illustrated using Manchester Congestion plan as an example.