## 3 The Process of Public Consultation in the \"OpenGov\" Platform  
The \"OpenGov\" platform [43] aims at serving the principles of transparency, consultation, collaboration and accountability of the public sector in Greece, accomplished by the provision of free-access of citizens and stakeholders to information and public affairs as well as the promotion of public e-engagement in the decision-making processes of the public sector. The \"OpenGov\" supports the objective of public e-consultation, which takes place along the following _four stages_ (Figure 3) [43]:  
* Stage 1--preparation of the public consultation process: refers to (a) work carried out within the _public agency_ involved, such as appointing of persons/group in charge for the consultation, appointing of a group of moderators properly trained for dealing with issues raised in the participatory process, and preparation of draft legislations/policy decisions as well as additional material in support of the e-consultation processes; and (b) work carried out at the Innovation Unit of EKDDA (National Centre of Public Administration and Local Government), responsible for the provision of technical support on the: creation of respective website, organization of the ICTs-enabled participatory process and uploading of the consultation material, opening and closure of the e-participatory processes, _etc._;
* Stage 2--running of the e-consultation process: at this stage, the participatory process runs for a predefined time span, during which the group of moderators is in charge for handling issues raised on a daily basis (e.g., questions of participants, rough elaboration of comments prior to upload);  
Figure 2: Main open governance actions of the Greek government in the context of OGP initiative. * Stage 3--elaboration of comments collected in the e-platform: at this stage are evaluated the e-consultation process and the results obtained, leading to the production of a consultation report; and
* Stage 4--production of decision/report: the whole consultation process ends up with the publication of the specific policy decision, together with the consultation report. It should be noted that the public e-consultation process is supported not only by a certain \"code of conduct and good practice\", but also by the institutional framework (Parliament internal rules and [47, 48]), according to which e-consultations become _compulsory_ for all draft legislations and policy decisions, while their duration is defined to _at least three weeks_. The experience gained by the four years of operation of the \"OpenGov\" platform can be summarized as follows (elaboration of data from [43]):  
Figure 3: Successive stages of public e-consultation process in the “OpenGov” context. Quantitative results:  
* Three-hundred sixty-one e-consultations have taken place on the \"OpenGov\" platform (52% legislative, 27% pre-legislative and 23% other), gathering 99.206 comments by September 2013;
* The number of e-consultations per year has increased in the period October 2012 to September 2013, while the number of comments per year has decreased 10% in the same period;
* During the life-time of \"OpenGov\", there is an average of 7.5 e-consultations running in each month, while it is also noticed the limited interest for participation during the summer time (much smaller number of comments for e-consultations running in July and August);
* The average duration of e-consultations is 17 days (less than the legally binding minimum, which is three weeks), while the average number of comments per e-consultation is 260;
* As to the share of e-consultations among Greek ministries, evidence shows that the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change rates in the first position, while when considering the number of comments per e-consultation, first rates the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Culture and Sports.