In an e-deliberation environment it is particularly important to conceive tools and web interfaces able to facilitate social online interactions between citizens and public officers. In this paper we present some choices made in the development of an e-deliberation platform. In particular we will focus on the use of maps to facilitate citizens interaction based on geo-localized discussions, and on the design of an ad hoc interface for online discussion to increase citizens' participation.

The authors present the basic features of a specification language for concurrent distributed systems, developed at the Department of Information Sciences of the University of Milan, Italy. The language is based on a class of modular algebraic high-level nets, OBJSA nets, which result from the synthesis of superposed automata (SA) nets and of the algebraic specification language OBJ. It is supported by the OBJSA Net Environment (ONE). OBJSA nets stress the possibility of building the system model by composing its components and encourage the incremental development of the specification and its reusability. An OBJSA net consists of an SA net inscribed with terms of an OBJ module. The ONE environment supports the user in producing and executing a specification, hiding from her/him, as much as possible, the technical details of the algebraic part of the specification. The paper provides a complete presentation of OBJSA nets, including a user-oriented introduction, the definition of OBJSA nets (as subclass of SPEC-inscribed nets), of their occurrence rule (the semantics) and of the composition operation. In addition it presents the kernel of the support environment.

The need of supporting office work with suitable computer based tools implies the investigation of the deep aspects of cooperation within the office. Cooperation, to the extent that is made up of communication and coordination, can be fully characterized under the assumption that an office is a special linguistic game, constituted by a set of rules defining the conversations possible within it, continuously changing under the perturbations created by the speech acts its member do performing the conversations. Within this conceptual context, a prototypal software package, CHAOS-1, is presented. CHAOS-1 aims both at supporting the conversations and at improving coordination of the office activities.This paper discusses CHAOS-1 with respect to similar proposals, presents its overall architecture, shows some examples of its use and sketches its new releases under development.