@conference {4956, title = {E2 Participation: Electronically Empowering Citizens for Social Innovation through Agreement Technologies}, booktitle = {14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research}, year = {2013}, month = {17/06/2013}, address = {Qu{\'e}bec, Canada}, abstract = {Following the open government trend and based on its three principles {\textendash} collaboration, transparency and participation; participation initiatives are been conducted by many governments around the world. Despite the wide range and variety of such initiatives, most of them face a common technical challenge {\textendash} lack of technical tools to automatically summarize stakeholders{\textquoteright} opinions and discussions. Addressing the challenge, this paper introduces a new concept on e-Participation research {\textendash} Electronic Empowerment (E2) Participation, a new approach to automatically identify collective thinking patterns in e-Participation initiatives. The concept was coined as part of a multi-disciplinary research project aiming at integrating Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering techniques and tools with Electronic Governance models and principles to design innovative tools for e- Participation. Since our research work is at its early stages, the main contribution of this paper is introducing the E2 Participation concept and outlining a framework for its implementation.}, author = {C. Ches{\~n}evar and Elsa Estevez and Carles Sierra and Nardine Osman} }