"Citizen's Voice - E-petitions" is a great example of use of IT in order to increase transparency in communication between citizens and the Government. Portal enables collection and processing of proposals for specific actions initiated by the citizens, which are then supported by the Government and forwarded to be processed further in the event that such initiatives are supported by the legally prescribed number of citizens. The goal of the portal is to help citizens more effectively participate in the political life of their country and influence the process of creating public policies.
Since October 9, 2012, when the Portal was launched by the then Prime Minister of Montenegro Igor Luksic, who was also the initiator of this modern way of communication between the Government and citizens, a total of 14 electronic petitions have been submitted, and one was voted, receiving 6,616.00 votes. The portal allows all adult citizens of Montenegro and foreigners who have an identity card for foreigners, to submit petitions and/or vote for them.
Citizen's voice portal is the first portal of its kind in our region, and it has been presented on the meeting of The Venice Club, a renown European professional forum for Governmental communications, on their own initiative. The solution was also presented to the Slovak government, and Hillary Clinton praised the initiative in Brazil as part of the Annual Conference of the Open Government Partnership as an example of transparent work of the state administration.
The portal "Citizen's - E-petitions" was developed and implemented as user friendly environment for initiating and submitting online petitions. Portal has two functional segments, which, to the end user, appear as a whole. The segment that deals with activities managing the flow of the petition(submitting, support, search...) is clearly separate from the segment that is used for administration and managing the activities of controlling the validity of the signee, communication with relevant Government institutions, approving the publication of petitions... In this segment, a complex workflow nad kandidovanom peticijom, od podnošenja do njenog prihvatanja i objavljivanja na portalu. Rok za izglasavanje peticije je 60 dana, a neophodni broj glasova podrške je 3.000. Vlada je u obavezi da izglasanu peticiju razmatra i u slučaju da je prihvati, posredstvom nadležnog ministarstva podnese Skupštini. Na portalu su objavljeni uslovi podnošenja, kriterijumi za podnošenje elektronske peticije i pravna akta vezana za ovu oblast.
Part of the website that is edited through CMS (Content management system) is completely flexible and arranged in accordance with the needs and requirements that achieve full accuracy, confidentiality, transparency and legality of the procedures necessary for the operation of the public part of the portal. This part of the portal has the ability to change and adapt to new needs in the production phase without additional programming.
The e-Petition application was developed using the .NET framework ASP.NET. For some of the work with system users, the Microsoft Membership Provider was used as a security layer recommended by Microsoft for systems that do not rely on Active Directory. Popularly, this platform is also called "Form authentication”.
The home page of the "Citizen's Voice - E-petitions" portal contains information on petitions that are divided into three groups - the most visited petitions, the latest petitions and petitions whose voting deadline is about to expire.
All petitions available on the portal are visible to users. Petitions can also be sorted by columns displayed in the grid. Filtering is also enabled based on the status of the petition - petitions that have been voted or petitions whose voting is in progress.
Also, users are able to follow the status of the petition that interests them, which eliminates the possibility that by some administrative omission the petition remains unprocessed. All data is stored in a relational database, which enables the generation of different types of reports and statistics.
The submitters of the petition, as well as the signees of the submitted petitions, are able to enter other obligatory personal data - Social Security Number and ID card number, in addition to their name and surname and residential address, very easily and using intuitive procedures. From the moment of automated computer control verification by matching the data with the Central Population Register in order to validate the initiative or support the submission, the Social Security Number and ID number are protected, encrypted and are not available to anyone in accordance with the Law on Personal Data Protection.
Administrators of the portal have the obligation to perform periodic backups and other tasks involving system maintenance. CMS section administrators can expand (change) the structure of the site, create new pages and modify existing pages.
