Anargyros G. Passas , Theodore N. Tsekos A PROCEDURAL MODEL FOR PUBLIC DELIBERATION * 1. INTRODUCTION The public participation concept is recently receiving increasing attention due to the augmenting scientific interest for the eParticipation field and its technological aspects [1]. However, through this approach emphasis is given to the technological facilitation, while the underlying concept of participation as a decision making and a policy development methodology is not adequately discussed. Understanding such a composite framework seems to be a rather complicated endeavour as far as no dominant paradigm providing an integrated definition and circumscribing the multidimensional boundaries of the participation phenomenon has been yet developed. The deliberation analysis, from an ICT approach is located at the dialogic and interpretative corners of the Deetz's scheme while from a public policy approach it should be located at the critical and normative corners [2]. This should explain the ambiguity and ambivalence of the existing descriptive and interpretative approaches in the field of e-Participation [3],[4] Public participation can increase both the quality and the legitimacy of policy making. Policy quality may be enhanced through a multi-approach scientific expertise that can get incorporated in the policy outcomes by the means of an open and participative scientific dialogue on a given policy issue. Legitimacy, in its turn, can be improved by the way of a more extensive acceptance of the results of an inclusive deliberation on a controversial issue [5], [6], [7], [8] . 2. CRITICAL PARAMETERS OF PUBLIC DELIBERATION Balancing expertise and democracy is a critical question of substantive participation [9]. Technical knowledge is necessary to elucidate each and every dimension of a composite public issue in order to ensure full comprehension of the problem, establish an effective spectrum of alternatives and allocate accordingly collective preferences. On the other hand democratic dialogue is essential for constructing, differentiating and synthesizing collective preferences. Technical knowledge is based on in depth expertise, extensive research and a neutral approach, while democratic dialogue implies partisanship and potential antagonism between affected parties. Participation requires effective deliberation. Most scholars and policy practitioners agree that participation and deliberation could become valuable rejuvenating tools not just for policy making but broadly for representative democracy, serving as an improved framework of contemporary political organization. To this end, deliberation techniques need to overcome obstacles impeaching the effective incorporation of diverse collective and individual interests, to ensure comparable levels of field expertise, communicative capacities and styles [10] , to develop common dialogic grounds under the forms of multidimensional consensuses and rationality [11] and to guarantee input and output legitimacy, quality of deliberation (throughput) and insertion into the public space * A reviewed version of this paper was published in: Tambouris, E., Macintosh, A. (eds.) Electronic Participation, Proceedings of Ongoing Research, Trauner Verlag , Shriftenreihe Informatik, Band 31, 2009