The aim of the SIG Politicians and elected representatives is to create a community space where political actors and decision-makers can share experiences and search for ideas on how to enhance public participation using ICT. The core aims of the political policy-makers interest group are:

• To form a common ground for engagement of politicians interested in enhancing citizen participation in democratic deliberation and strategic decision-making
• To promote the exchange of findings and the dialogue among researchers and prac-titioners, especially politicians
• To enable dissemination of research results and to advance research agenda by pro-moting new research into areas of interest to the SIG Politicians and elected repre-sentatives
• To bring in the expertise and advice of the policy-makers for future research and commercial tool development
• To contribute to the know-how selection and evaluation bank of methods and tools for practitioners (users) taking into consideration issues such as digital divide, gender, culture etc.