Based on the results of a previous project, “The Virtual Region”, undertaken as part of the INTERREG IIC North-western Europe programme, the AA ECONET project is intended to compensate for a part of the European Union’s democratic deficit through development of “Electronic (E) Communities”. Given the urgency of recreating and reinvigorating political dialogue at the local, regional, national and community levels in the Atlantic Area, the objective of AA ECONET is to increase IT use among political decision-makers and civil society, in this way encouraging the general public to consult and participate in political decisions, within a framework of interactive exchange, and in real time. Achievements: The project has developed and deployed a multilingual e-Consultation service known as ECONET to help the public authorities in the Atlantic Area consult their citizens at local and transnational level. It is based on an Internet system which includes an open-source version. The project was developed in three main phases: 1) Defining the target tool 2) Developing pilot projects 3)Constituting a centre of excellence to share the experience outside the partnership and the Atlantic Area. 1) In the first phase of the project, the partnership produced two reports: ✔ A report on the state of the art in public consultation and the benefits of electronic systems , analysing conventional consultations in the project partner regions (types of consultation, methods, target groups, frequency of the process etc.) and the potential added value generated by electronic consultations (widening existing consultations to inter-regional or transnational levels, access to data and information for the public consulted, interaction between different consultations according to areas of interest, tracking opinions given by members of the public etc.). ✔ Report on "consultation workshops": this report covers the dissemination workshops organised by three partner local authorities (Galway, La Rioja, San Sebastiàn) aimed at the general public in their administrative areas and at their own staff. It describes the recommendations and pilot studies to be carried out based on the different regions of the partnership. 2) Developing the technical system to support the solution – pilot consultations carried out by each of the six partner authorities: ✔ Choosing a contractor through a public tender to design the multilingual Internet consultation system. Producing a Microsoft .NET version and a Java open-source version. ✔ New links between the websites of the various partners; inserting entry points on large public portals. ✔ Training the staff of the partner local authorities (technical staff to initialise and maintain the system, administrative staff to inform and support users). ✔ Developing forums, moderation methods and targeted questionnaires; alerts on current and future consultations; feedback from users. ✔ Themes of the pilot consultations: marketing strategies, development policy, the road network etc. A transnational consultation was conducted by the partnership as a whole. ✔ Press campaigns for the launch of the ECONET system and information on public access portals. ✔ Galway County Council was responsible for liaising with the technical contractor about solutions to problems encountered during the phase of testing and integrating ECONET with the different partners'systems. 3) The e-Communities centre of excellence, disseminating the results and transferring the technology: ✔ Producing a guide to best practice in the various stages of an e-Consultation (building electronic communities for citizens and decision-makers, advertising, supervision etc.) – Producing an administrator's guide to e-Consultation (from the technical phase to the administrative phase). Both guides are available at http://econet.ernact.net. ✔ "Serious game" interface: based on geographical information systems, making it possible to represent projects being consulted on visually, together with their consequences and the opinions of the public. ✔ Developing a service to help with the creation of "transnational" communities to facilitate the link between actors and public authorities or agencies in the areas of public service, tourism, health etc.(putting together a guide to services including geographical location, organisation chart, leading role, description of tasks, comparison of services based on the standard classification of services in the EU, etc.) ✔ Presentations of the project: - i2010 conference for European regions and cities in Olomouc (CZ) - Seminar on public consultation organised by the Spanish Municipalities Association in Malaga (ES) - Presentation to the European Commission's DG Information Society. - Several presentations of the ECONET system to local authorities in the regions of the Interreg partnership and the ERNACT network. ✔ Technology transfer: transfer of the ECONET system to the municipality of Calahorra (Spain) and Louth County Council (Ireland) ✔ Ambition to continue exploiting the project's results beyond the Interreg timetable through intellectual property protection and partnership agreements between public authorities, software developers and technology transfer specialists in the Atlantic Area (this type of partnership corresponds to the multidisciplinary nature of the e-Consultation process).