*2.1. e-Participation*

In the context of governance, participation is a basic democratic right. Sartori [20] describes it as "personally taking part in something; self-activated, willed taking part, not caused by others or mobilised from above". In general, the term participation includes a range of concepts, from formal participation (exercising the right to vote and the reception of administrative actions) to active participation or political participation in the resolution of conflicts and making public decisions (governance).

The electronic governmen<sup>t</sup> (e-Government) of society can be defined as the utilisation of ICTs in Public Administration with the aim of improving public services and democratic processes, thereby strengthening support of public policies [21]; e-Government can be applied to the two broad areas of Public Administration activity: (i) the provision of services (e-Administration) and (ii) political participation in democratic processes (e-Governance). Nevertheless, the term e-Participation has, traditionally, been exclusively associated with political participation or e-Governance in its widest sense (participation in public decision making relative to the governance of society).

Given this interpretation of e-Participation (or e-Governance), e-Cognocracy can be considered as a new model of participation which, in the context of e-Governance, provides cognitive collaborative public decision making [22] and addresses [16] the demand of Michels and De Graaf [9] for e-participation models: " ... to think about smart ways of combining participatory processes and formal decision-making, for example, by splitting the process into different phases and coupling participatory and deliberative phases to the phases of decision-making."
