## 4 E-Consultation on the Spatial Development of the Tourist Sector in Greece
### E-Consultation Results
As a next step, issues relating to the effectiveness of the e-consultation process are discussed, where the following remarks can be made:  
* _Participation_ was rather low compared to the importance of the specific sector for the Greek economy, which can be partly justified by: the timing of consultation, being at the heart of the summer time, a period of relaxation for citizens, stakeholders, agencies _etc._ or of rush work for tourist stakeholders; and the fact that this was the third public consultation opened within a two years time span, with the previous ones having somehow resolved a number of issues of tourist interest (e-consultation of March 9-20 2012 on the approval of the SF-T and the Environmental Impact Assessment Study, receiving 81 comments and e-consultation of January 16-29 2013, focusing on the restructuring of the Greek National Tourism Organization, the simplification of procedures to enhance tourist entrepreneurship _etc._, receiving 273 comments) [43]. * _Time period_: the e-consultation has had a large time span (approximately six weeks), compared to what was usually used so far in other consultation contexts (approximately two weeks). Nevertheless, this did not work to the benefit of participation, as the timing was rather unfortunate. * _Participation mean_: as the \"OpenGov\" platform supports only e-consultation processes, participation implies the disposable by participants of certain ICTs skills, thus excluding some groups of potential participants (ICTs-illiterate). Moreover, it presupposes access to the Internet, which is not always the case (small isolated islands or mountainous regions with no or of bad quality accessibility) [32]. * Lack of _monitoring of the participatory process_, which can orient action of the public agency running the consultation towards motivating participants, e.g., by sending, during the consultation period, regular messages for wide dissemination of the consultation. This is evident by the distribution in time of comments received, where the majority was received during the last day. Figure 5: Elaboration of e-consultation comments. (**a**) Type of participants; (**b**) Comments by article; (**c**) Submission date. * Lack of _flexibility on duration_, implying the need to be flexible in respect of time duration of the e-consultation, and be able to extent it in case of low participation. Of course this can be combined with certain motivation actions to increase level of participation. * _Openness_ of the platform: comments uploaded in the \"OpenGov\" platform are open to all participants, serving thus transparency of the decision-making process. As a next step, the elaboration of the _context of comments_ received is carried out. Although the number of comments is rather poor, certain concluding _remarks_ can be drawn, such as:  
* _Relevance_ of the comments as to the: (a) e-consultation subject, where almost 90 percent of comments were relevant to the e-consultation issue (only two comments were irrelevant); and (b) article commented, where also the majority of comments (85 percent) were relevant (Figure 6a). Figure 6: Elaboration of the context of comments. (**a**) Relevance, (**b**) Repetitiveness, (**c**) Promotion, (**d**) Level of intervention, (**e**) Origin of participants, (**f**) Region-specific comments. * _Repetitiveness_, referring to the degree of similarity of comments: most of them (61 percent) had no similarities, while 22 percent were exactly the same with other comments (Figure 6b). * _Personal/organizational promotion_ as a feature of the comments received, relating somehow to the motive of participants involved. Almost 30 percent of the comments received, contained a certain form of personal/organizational promotion (e.g., website link) (Figure 6c).