Legese

Easing Participation in Legislative Processes

The implementation of European Directives and other legislation at regional and local level has a major impact on citizens’ lives, but few are aware or participate in the local implementation of such legislation.

LEGESE (www.legese.org) is an 18 month eParticipation Action project that will pilot trial a new service to encourage easy communication and information exchange for effective public participation in the legislation implementation phase of European initiated legislation at the local and regional levels that are most directly relevant to most citizens’ lives.

The LEGESE service will run on the established eParticipate Public-i platform that centres on multimedia webcasting supported by contextual information and feedback facilities (www.publici.eu), providing easily accessible legislative documents using the innovative 602 XML forms system (www.602.cz), learning citizen-participation best-practice from the experience of the award-winning Bristol Council e-Petitioner system (http://itc.napier.ac.uk/e-petition/bristol/default.asp) and building directly on the very successful eTEN eParticipate project and experience (www.eparticipate.eu). The LEGESE service will be easy to use, technically open & standardised to interface with existing and future eGovernment systems. The service will be trialed for 9 months in 3 regions with very diverse local legislative implementation contexts in the Czech Republic, France and the UK.

As a web-based service, LEGESE will complement and enhance at a regional level the European Parliament’s own web television channel (www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/cm/622/622247/622815en.pdf), and provide future potential functional and citizencentered e-participation enhancements to that service.

The LEGES Partners are: