eParticipation chat rooms

Description:
Web applications where a chat session takes place in real time. Chats provide a means for live question-answer panels between experts or government personnel and participants and also the opportunity for peer-to-peer interaction within communities.

eParticipation areas:

• Community building / Collaborative Environments
• Consultation
• Electioneering

Stage policy cycle: Appropriate stage in policy cycle are (1) agenda setting and (2) policy formulation.


Specials:
Moderation is required to allow young people (under 16’s) to take part safely and to control any disruptive behaviour. Contrary to chat rooms in the internet, chats for eParticipation purposes are offered for a specific time-horizon, normally an hour at most. Often registration (in advance) is necessary or sensible. The chat room appeals because it allows users to freely interact with one another, an online discussion where participants post messages to others in this shared ‘chat space’. Each participant can normally see all other’s responses and these often overlap; this is an important difference from a discussion forum, which offers a more structured approach to discussion as input is typically organised by ‘threads’. This critical difference needs to be considered if the resulting discussion needs detailed analysis.


Channel:
Mainly accessed through PCs, but also (web-)clients for mobile phones do exist (problem of text input)

Technology:

• Collaborative environment

Evaluation:
They can be difficult to evaluate as the main focus is on whether the participants enjoyed the exercise and were satisfied with the responses from the expert panel.

Additions:
http://chat.yahoo.com/ http://www.chatdanger.com/

Tools:

	Yahoo! Messenger
	Downloadable chat tool