Participatory Immigration Policy Making and Harmonization based on Collaborative Web2.0 Technologies

EU-wide harmonisation of immigration policies is a long-standing and challenging issue, given the need to compromise numerous national immigration policy proposals, practices and procedures to achieve common, balanced, harmonised and effective EU policies. The challenge stems primarily from the legal, political, technological and societal differences in the different Member States, as well as from the exclusion of legal immigrants from the policy making processes and the formulation of balanced migration policy proposals.

Collaboration between various stakeholders including politicians and decision makers, but also citizens and the civil society, is essential to decrease the heterogeneity of policies, regulations and viewpoints. Despite this need, up to now, there are no proven and easy ways to ensure the participation and collaboration of all stakeholders, while current policy making processes barely even take this need into account.

Latest ICT developments, such as Web2.0 or collaborative knowledge management, provide numerous opportunities for participatory governance and citizen-generated policy making. Furthermore, they can boost innovation in terms of both policy making models and decision support tools. In view of these developments, ImmigrationPolicy2.0 will provide tools, techniques, solutions and overall services for a collaborative development of immigration policies, as well as for supporting related decisions. The project will pay emphasis in the provision and piloting of ICT infrastructures enabling the identification, modelling, analysis, visualisation, monitoring and harmonisation of diverse policies and viewpoints in a secure and reliable fashion.

Official Website of the Project: Immigration Policy 2.0.

Funding: Commission of the European Union / DG Information Society and Media
Completion: 31.08.2013
Researchers: Wolfgang Bosswick, Verena Krobisch, Kira Svetlova