Engaging citizens in public discourse is an idea that is rapidly growing. As e-government programmes, applications and services pervade our societies, the opportunities for citizens to have direct input into the deliberations of government grow.
In our evolving, network e-environment we are moving from a static government to citizen platform, to a government to citizen, citizen to government interaction. The latter is a nascent form of eDemocracy. Many countries in the world have undertaken online consultations with their citizenry. More importantly, many outside groups are now engaging in democratic activities at all levels of society, through the exchange of information and knowledge gathered from government websites and the exchanging of dialogue, information, knowledge and ideas.