Today, more than 50% of EU citizens are internet users and all the National Parliaments of Member States have established a web presence. Enabling participation in Governmental decision-making processes via advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become more important. ICT can e.g. help to cope with the increasing complexity and challenges emerging from the need to provide better information and wider involvement of citizens in governmental decision-making procedures.

The legislation process is usually not supported efficiently, as participation oriented systems that go beyond the available content management technologies of Parliaments’ web sites and enable the involvement of stakeholders in the legislation formulation and debate processes are not yet present.The vision of the

The main objective of the LEX-IS Project is to improve the legislative process in National Parliaments through enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages with the use of state-of-the-art information technology tools and methodologies.  LEX-IS is mainly targeting the initial steps in the legislative process, that pose the greatest needs in public participation, as following:

• The legislation proposal formation stage, driven by Ministries, Parliamentary Committees and Governmental Organisations. This stage typically includes scanning of the overall environment the proposed law is going to act upon, early identification of social problems and needs, as well as establishing the need for a policy or a change in policy.

• The debate on draft legislation in Parliaments, which includes (a) gathering evidence,  knowledge and supporting information from a range of sources, including citizens, businesses, Non-Governmental Organisations - NGOs, and other socio-economic organizations, (b) presenting and understanding the context, (c) designing the appropriate public policies for managing the problems that meet the needs of the involved parties, including the political context and (d) developing and concluding upon a range of options.


As the LEX-IS platform will be deployed, some initial results from supporting the implementation level and the legislation monitoring phases are also going to be extracted.  LEX-IS trials are going to be executed within the operational framework and with selected, real processes of the following European institutions, that are:

• The Austrian Parliament, having a specific programme supporting e-Participation of younger citizens.

• The Lithuanian Parliament, active within local e-participation initiatives, under the cooperation with the Technical University of Kaunas. 

• The Hellenic Parliament active within national e-participation initiatives.

In addition to the above the Model European Parliament (MEP), an organisation that drives the "European Parliament of the Youth" in 25 European Countries, with the active participation of more than 1,000 students every year that follow the processes and real issues of the European Parliament, have confirmed their interest to the project and they will closely follow project evolutions with main involvement their participation to the Evaluation activities.
 
With the introduction of LEX-IS web-based Platform for the participative support of the legislation proposal formation and the debate on draft legislation, the following main services will be made available to Parliaments, Businesses, Citizens and, especially, youngsters:

• The ability to query and view the legal structures and elements (draft laws, legal components, legal documents, supportive information) in multiple levels of abstraction and decomposition, using content management engines and legal metadata schemas already available within the consortium.

• The ability to view the argumentation structure of a law that is under formation, using semantic annotation and argument visualisation techniques.

• The ability to express opinions around legal components, arguments that are presented by the participating organisations, or opinions of other parties, in  a structured way that promotes participative decision-making.