Democratic Process and Digital Platforms: An Engineering Perspective

The widespread adoption of digital technologies and computational devices, along with their pervasiveness in our everyday life, is going to make them hugely impact over all key processes in human societies-including the democratic one. The last decade has witnessed the emergence of many tools and platforms for digital democracy. However, also because of the huge social and political pressure, such emergence has possibly been too tumultuous, leaving several fundamental concerns unanswered: among them, here we focus on those that belong to the engineering process. For instance, in a classic software engineering process, one or more artefacts are produced in the analysis phase that represent a formal, possibly machine understandable, model of the domain. Instead, looking at the most common e-democracy platforms, the step is seemingly missing, along with others that concur at building a solid engineering process. This chapter elaborates on the current status of digital democracy, and points out the main software engineering issues that current and future tools and platforms should address.