Internet is starting to permeate politics much as it has previously revolutionised education, business or the arts. Thus, there is a growing interest in areas of e-government and, more recently, e-democracy. However, most attempts in this field have just envisioned standard political approaches facilitated by technology, like e-voting or e-debating. Alternatively, we could devise a more transforming strategy based on deploying web based group decision support tools and promote their use for public policy decision making. This book delineates how this approach could be implemented. It addresses foundations, basic methodologies, potential implementation and applications, together with a thorough discussion of the many challenging issues. This innovative text will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of e-government, e-democracy and e-participation and research in decision analysis, negotiation analysis and group decision support.
