Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 14, No. 4, 2018 395 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Maturity in decision-making: a method to measure e-participation systems in virtual communities Cristiano Maciel* Instituto de Computação, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Rua Fernando Correa, 2367 Cuiabá, MT, Brazil Email: cmaciel@ufmt.br *Corresponding author Licinio Roque Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Coimbra, Polo II – Pinhal de Marrocos, Coimbra, Portugal Email: lir@dei.uc.pt Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia Departamento de Informática, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Av. Pasteur, 296 – Urca – Cep 22290-240, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Email: cristina.bicharra@uniriotec.br Abstract: The participation of citizens in the decision-making of a community is the essence of a democracy. As the number of citizens grew, direct participation became utopia and delegated to elected representatives. The spread of internet allied to the population pressure for transparency in government’s decisions brought mass participation back to the table. The communication channels are there, though citizens’ participations have not been effective frequently because their suggestions are not mature. This paper presents a method, maturity in decision-making (MDM), for measuring the maturity of a group for a decision considering the risk of group-thinking, shallow analysis or even polarisation. We have applied the method in two scenarios with promising results. Keywords: web-based interaction; web measurements; social networks; e-government; decision-making; virtual community. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Maciel, C., Roque, L. and Garcia, A.C.B. (2018) ‘Maturity in decision-making: a method to measure e-participation systems in virtual communities’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp.395–416. Biographical notes: Cristiano Maciel is a Researcher at the Interactive Virtual Environments Laboratory (LAVI), Professor in the Institute of Computing and in the Post-Graduate Program in Education, in the Federal University of Mato Grosso–Brazil. He has a PhD in Computation (UFF-RJ), in collaboration with