E-democracy

DEMOS stands for Delphi Mediation Online System and is a EU-funded research and development project of the IST Program (IST-1999-20530) covering the topic “e-democracy”. DEMOS is a web-based, moderated discussion forum for supporting opinion forming and, mainly, decision making within democratic systems, e.g., municipal politics or major public or private organisations. UID develops and implements the entire graphical user interface which, besides the actual discussion forum, covers an extensive moderation and administration tool. The challenge in designing a user interface for DEMOS lies in the fact that the users need to get easy and comfortable access to the extensive and novel functions of DEMOS, motivating them at the same time to actively participate in the different discussion levels. Besides utility and usability, joy of use is the particular focal point.