As our experience regarding the practice of deliberation grows, the position from which we evaluate it, and the criteria of this evaluation, change. This book presents a synthesis of recent research that has brought detailed and robust results. Its first section concerns contemporary challenges and new approaches to the public sphere. The second focuses on the Deliberative Poll as a specific deliberative technique and compares findings emanating from this practice in various political and cultural contexts. The third section addresses the challenge of determining what constitutes deliberative quality. Finally, the last section discusses democratic deliberation and deliberative democracy as they relate to the complex challenges of contemporary politics.

Public consultations are a weak but institutionally embedded form of civic participation in political decision-making. Their input and output are often a cause for concern. This has motivated the authors to design the inDialogue platform to help transmit knowledge about the methodology of public consultations. It follows the deliberative public consultation model, and recognizes the value of social inclusion in knowledge-sharing and argument exchange in building an open political community. In this book, researchers as well as practitioners, in their respective fields, discuss various aspects of the inDialogue software's development and implementation. They document the complexity of the work that was carried out in an applied interdisciplinary project in the area of democratic innovation. "The value of this volume is not only in its presentation of inDialogue as an innovative application enabling those with disabilities to access public debate and consultation, but also in raising important questions about the introduction of ICT for debate and consultation. These questions are answered from both the perspective of the technical and social sciences." Jerzy Bartkowski, Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Warsaw University "ICT for Dialogue and Inclusive Decision-Making is a splendid contribution to the literature concerning online deliberation and civic engagement. It usefully bridges the academic world of theory and empirical studies, and the practice of citizen deliberation, carefully documenting both the design and experiences of the In Dialogue project in Poland." Todd Davies, Associate Director and lecturer, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University