Social networks and 3D virtual worlds are usually thought of as recreational spaces, where people interact with friends and acquaintances, or others with similar interests. But the latest developments in e-government, itself traditionally considered to merely be about making essential government services available online, are moving into the sphere of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest as public policymakers look for new ways to find out what people think of their proposals.

A study published by the European Union in February showed that, in 2010, both the quality and quantity of e-government services were on the rise. Across Europe, 82 per cent of basic public services – like car registration and tax declarations – were accessible online, compared with 69 per cent in 2009. Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President responsible for the digital agenda, declared herself "pleased" that more people could, for example, register a new company on the internet. Yet, the progress was not universal. The same study revealed that services for businesses had developed more quickly than those for individuals. The take up of e-procurement was still low. And inevitably, a survey identifying high-fliers such as Austria, Ireland and Italy also marked out stragglers including Greece, Cyprus and Romania.

To encourage progress, the EU's e-government action plan for 2011 to 2015 sets out lofty ambitions: empowering citizens by making more information available online; reinforcing the single market through e-government initiatives which make it easier to live, work and study around Europe; and creating low carbon, efficient public administrations. The EU wants 50 per cent of individuals and 80 per cent of businesses to use e-government tools by the end of 2015. But as the plan acknowledges, it is the responsibility of member states to implement e-government services. Mostly the EU's role is to set targets, facilitate discussions, create favourable legal conditions, work on cross border interoperability – and assess each country's performance.

But e-government is not just about simplifying public services. It is also about involving citizens more deeply in the democratic process. This can be achieved by making it easier to vote: for example, in Estonia's elections this year 25 per cent of voters cast their ballot online – although, while surveys show enthusiasm among the public, this technology has not been widely pursued so far. Where the EU is playing a bigger role is in the development of tools which involve people in policy-making. The action plan says: "Member states are committed to developing and promoting more useful and better ways, relying on ICT solutions, for businesses and citizens to participate in public policy consultation." To that end the EU, through its main instrument for funding technological research, the seventh framework programme, is backing nine innovative e-government projects.

One of those projects is WeGov, an attempt to harness the power of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Paul Walland is the project coordinator, based at the University of Southampton's IT Innovation Centre: "What WeGov is trying to do is put tools in the hands of policymakers," he tells PublicServiceEurope.com. Instead of governments or local authorities testing policies by using targeted questionnaires and specific e-government websites – which usually elicit a muted response from the public – WeGov is developing a tool which will allow them to use social networks to engage people in debates. "It's a mix of things," Walland says, "from putting an opinion out there in the general community and monitoring the reaction to that, through to tracking hot topics and the kinds of opinions people are expressing within social networking sites."

WeGov is part-funded by FP7 programme to the tune of just under €2m, and two pilot schemes are planned in Spain and Germany. A simple user-interface will allow policymakers to choose a topic and "inject" it into whichever social networks they choose – by Tweeting, blogging or using discussion groups in Facebook or LinkedIn. Walland admits that if public policy is increasingly based on social media reactions, certain people may find their voices go unheard, but he adds that such a danger exists "with any technique that is used to gather popular opinion. This is a response to broaden the net rather than catch everybody". Privacy is another issue that crops up whenever government goes near social networks. "The way the thing is approached is very important, to make sure we are not just operating within the legal boundaries but the harder to define ethical boundaries that people have." As Walland says, politicians "want to use every tool available to them to interact with the public".

There is a similar premise behind another EU funded project, called +Spaces or alternatively Positive Spaces. In this case scenarios set in 3D virtual worlds, as well as social networks, will be used to test reactions to policy ideas. Michal Jacovi, project coordinator and a researcher in the social technologies group at computing giant IBM's facility in Haifa, Israel, explains: "The idea is to run policies by people and get their opinions by going to them, rather than by inviting them, as happens today, to e-government websites to fill in forms or vote. We wanted to go to where the public is." As with WeGov, a tool has been devised for policymakers – the +Spaces project's partners include the Greek parliament, and Jacovi hopes more will become involved in future – to easily ask questions and create debates across the range of social networks.

The most innovative part of the project is to be tested next year. Jacovi says: "We focused on role-playing, where you invite people to take part, and you assign roles. You might give someone the role of optimist or pessimist. People have to say not just what they already think, or have heard elsewhere, but they need to actually pretend to be someone else and think about it. We have a 3D version where avatars actually meet and we also use Twitter." She gives a practical example: "For instance the policy of banning smoking in public places: we had a workshop where people played the roles of a smoker, a non-smoker, a restaurant owner, a public health person, and a policeman. They were guided to assume they were five years in the future, and half of them were utopian and half dystopian. It brings insights to the policymaker but also to the people themselves."

This may seem somewhat frivolous at first, but as Professor Thomas Gordon – who leads another FP7 funded project, IMPACT, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin, says: "The whole area of e-participation is of growing importance". For Gordon, involving citizens in the early stages of planning policy is vital. He cites a topical example. "You can see that here in Germany with this huge debate about Stuttgart 21, the train station. There are demonstrations going on and it's a hot topic whether or not to build it. And one of the reasons it's a hot topic from my point of view is because citizens were not adequately involved in the planning phase, and now the politicians are facing this huge problem." This is what IMPACT is about: facilitating debates about policy proposals. The project has €1.6m of EU funding with teams at universities in Leeds, Liverpool and Amsterdam, as well as private sector partners.

Gordon says: "We're trying to develop tools which give you a good overview of a complex debate by using visualisation methods, creating a map of a debate." Similar techniques have been used before – for example the Debategraph used frequently by CNN in the United States. "It's also about argument tracking," Gordon continues, "so you can keep track of arguments as they come in and become notified as things happen without having to go back and look at the map. So the idea is that the map is not a snapshot but evolves as the dialogue goes on. An argument map is not so much about who said what and when, but what are the issues, arguments and proposals? What are the pros and cons of these proposals, who are the stakeholders, what are their interests?" The maps will include links to original sources where arguments were made, and Gordon sees the potential for the technology to be used by the European Commission as it sifts through responses to consultations.

The IMPACT team is also developing is a rule-based system which will help people better understand policy proposals. "Say there's a change in housing benefit under discussion," explains Gordon. "We would model the current rules for housing benefit, along with the proposed rules that are being discussed. Then you enter your information and it'll tell you your entitlement under the current law and under the alternative policies. It would create an argument map that would help you understand why these different policies have the effect they do. The idea here is to help people become more informed about how policies really work, and then they can contribute their argument. They'd also be able to store these cases on the web so people can go and try them out again. We have to be very careful about privacy, so they're not real cases, they're anonymised, so: would a single mother with a child be entitled to housing benefit and so on."

More traditional techniques like surveys can still be useful. Gordon says: "Instead of going out and looking for texts on the web about the subject and creating maps about the arguments, you publish a survey. With responses to the survey you are getting arguments back that are already in the right form – the human users don't need to know anything about argumentation theory or computational models, they are just answering questions in the usual way. But behind the scenes, what they are really doing is substantiating argumentation patterns, and making arguments which can be visualised." Of course, all these projects are at the research stage, and how widely the techniques they are testing will be used by policymakers remains unknown – particularly as the development of e-government has been so unbalanced so far. Gordon, for example, is surprised that Germany isn't further down the road. "Germany is one of the major economies in the world but in this we are not leading." In some areas of e-government – as he says, it is a "big subject, there are a lot of aspects to it" – he cites Austria, the UK and the Netherlands as being well ahead.

And, as Gordon relates, Germany also provides an example of how e-government projects can run into difficulties, despite their time and money saving potential. "There was a system here called ELENA. The idea was that all companies would send information about their employees to a central database, all electronically, and it would be used for calculating employment benefits and so on. Unfortunately they've now cancelled that. They had already started to put it into practice, but because of privacy issues, which are very important anyway but especially here in Germany, there was a backlash. People were upset about all this data being collected in a central place by government." He concludes: "So they're going back to the old paper-based system." And here Gordon could just as well be talking about e-government as a whole: "Who knows what the future will bring?"