Towards Effective EU E-Participation: The Development of AskThePublic

E-participation platforms can be an important asset for governments in increasing trust and fostering democratic societies. By engaging non-governmental and private institutions, domain experts, and even the general public, policymakers can make informed and inclusive decisions. Drawing on the Media Richness Theory and applying the Design Science Research method, we explore how a chatbot can be designed to improve the effectiveness of the policy-making process of existing citizen involvement platforms. Leveraging the Have Your Say platform, which solicits feedback on European Commission initiatives and regulations, a Large Language Model based chatbot, called AskThePublic is created, providing policymakers, journalists, researchers, and interested citizens with a convenient channel to explore and engage with public input. By conducting 11 semistructured interviews, the results show that the participants value the interactive and structured responses as well as enhanced language capabilities, thus increasing their likelihood of engaging with AskThePublic over the existing platform. An outlook for future iterations is provided and discussed with regard to the perspectives of the different stakeholders.