Project Overview

LEGESE (www.legese.org) is an 18 month eParticipation Action project that will pilot trial a new service to encourage easy communication and information exchange for effective public participation in the legislation implementation phase of European initiated legislation at the local and regional levels that are most directly relevant to most citizens’ lives. LEGESE will provide easy access to and understanding of the huge body of EU legislation that is the source and driver of much legislation that is implemented at National and Regional level throughout Europe.

The LEGESE service will run on the established eParticipate Public-i platform that centres on multimedia webcasting supported by contextual information and feedback facilities, providing easily accessible legislative documents using the innovative 602 XML forms system, learning citizen-participation best-practice from the experience of the award-winning Bristol Council e-Petitioner system and building directly on the very successful eParticipate project and experience. The LEGESE service will be easy to use, technically open and standardised to interface with existing and future eGovernment systems. The service will be trialed for 9 months in 3 regions with very diverse local legislative implementation contexts in the Czech Republic, France and the UK.

View the list of Legese Partners

LEGESE Project Objectives & Goals

LEGESE aims to promote the development and use of ICT in the legislative decision-making processes, in regional, parliamentary and government environments, aiming at enhancing the participation of citizens and contributing to better legislation and its implementation.

The overall objectives of LEGESE are to demonstrate concrete cases where, with the help of modern ICT tools and applications, improvements of the legislative/legislation process and its outcomes can be achieved, and at the same time, enhance the participation of the public (citizens, businesses, socio-economic and political groups, etc) in the decision-making process, amongst others through improved interaction with decision-makers. Both topics, legislation and public participation, are relevant at EU and Member State, but particularly at Regional and local levels (which are most immediately relevant to the lives of most citizens).

The LEGESE Project focuses initially on this regional and local level, and addresses the legislation/legislative process at implementation (stage 3) of the four stages of European legislation:

  1. the legislation proposal formation stage (e.g. by Regional Authorities and relevant institutions),
  2. the debate on draft legislation (e.g. in Councils and with citizens, businesses, NGOs and other socio-economic groups),
  3. the implementation level,
  4. the follow-up/monitoring of the legislation life cycle (e.g. amendments, impacts, etc).

The key output of the project will be a significant increase in user take up and involvement of citizens in their regional European legislative implementation process. In addition to the immediate impact during the project on over 0.4M citizens in 3 Member States across the EU, it is anticipated that the longer-term impact of LEGESE will be to establish the critical importance of easy-to-use citizen-centered eParticipation services in the success of all eGovernment legislative processes whilst enabling any EU Legislative Authority to readily implement the LEGESE solutions from this project. As a web-based service, LEGESE will complement and enhance at a regional level the European Parliament’s own EPLive webcasting service and EPTV web television channel , and provide future potential functional and citizen-centered e-participation enhancements to those services.

The LEGESE objectives and expected outcomes of the project are as follows:

Objective Target
Increased Citizen Participation in their Regional Legislative Processes. (a) 25% increase in citizen participation in their regional legislative processes.
(b) in 3 very different legislative regions across the EU during the project..
Demonstration of a viable on-line Service to provide easy participation in Legislative Processes (a) Operation of a localised LEGESE service in each of 3 Pilot Trial Regions. (b) Demonstration of the service scale-up potential to National and EU levels
Sustainable operation of the LEGESE Service (a) Viability Plan for subsequent sustainable operation of the service across Europe.

Given the pilot trial nature of LEGESE a supplementary objective is to explore the possibilities/conditions for scaling up these efforts towards a mature and sustained implementation of the LEGESE Service across Europe and at National and European levels, particularly in the context of the future development of the European Parliament’s EPLive webcasting and EPTV Web TV Channel and services. This will be specifically factored into the project’s evaluation plan.