Lessons learned from introducing videoconferencing systems into municipal decision making processes in the finnish archipelago town of Väståboland

The eDemocracy Toolbox (eDT) is a pilot case implemented in an EU funded integrated project Collaboration@Rural. The initial motivation behind eDT was the national municipal restructuring process in Finland which reduced the number of independent municipalities from the 431 (2006) to 342 (2010), but which increased the size of municipalities and thus the distances to municipal administrative centres. Encouraged by the National Strategy for Information Society (2007-2015) the municipalities in the archipelago area of the Southwest Finland looked for innovative and cost effective ICT-based solutions for their democratic and administrative processes. This paper discusses the results and lessons learned from the eDT case that introduced systematic use of videoconferencing in local administration and government using Living Lab methodology. As a result of the cooperation between civil servants, citizens, software developers and researchers a set of specifications including test cases for evaluating the suitability of a candidate application for conducting municipal distributed meetings were co-created.