ABSTRACT
Discussions concerning opportunities for the support of political debates and decision-making processes through information systems are long standing. The relevant issues have been discussed for at least three decades. Around 1970, the attention focused on comprehensive service arrangements of a so-called ‘information utility’, which was expected to materialise on an infrastructure of bi-directional TV cable networks. Next to information services and online shopping, the pros and cons of online voting and polling and of supporting democratic participation in planning processes were hotly debated in North America (for a summary of this discussion see Lenk 1976). The merging of data bank and communication technologies that took shape in the late 1960s provided the basis for new concepts. These concepts sought to support democratic decision making by providing relevant information to stakeholders or to the general public and by structuring debates and lines of reasoning. Examples include a system called MINERVA, developed by Amitai Etzioni, which was intended to intensify direct democracy by supporting debates on particular issues. Similar experiments were conducted in Germany by systems scientist Helmut Krauch (Lenk 1976).
