E-Participation Guidelines for Decision-Makers: Social Listening Through the Digital Dashboard

As part of the DEEP-linking Youth project, ECAS has developed a set of guidelines for decision-makers on how to use e-participation as an instrument to engage young people and stimulate their active participation in democratic life.

The guidelines are based on the outcomes of the project, which involved examining different ways to reach out to young people using digital tools and the creation of an online Digital Dashboard for policy-makers to listen to the views of young people, particularly those who do not typically engage in decision-making processes.

Through the two main activities, the project has highlighted the need to better understand the digital psychology behind young people’s willingness to participate politically and demonstrated the value of a Digital Dashboard as a tool for gathering and extracting data.

The main recommendations are:

• That stakeholders, politicians and organisations experiment with the Digital Dashboard as a
  tool that can complement continual engagement or as an aid to a policy-making process.
• That the Digital Dashboard is tested with a more specific or even ‘controversial’ topic for
  future research.
• That policy-makers should commission online content generated by youth audiences in the
  pursuit of engaging with them.
• That digital education is necessary so that more young people are educated about data
  mining and the repercussions of their online behaviour.

ECAS has also produced the report ‘Recommendations on Learning Mobility: Insights from the Digital Dashboard‘ as part of the project.

Read the full report
Find out more about DEEP-linking Youth and Digital Democracy
Digital Dashboard