potential mathematical models which encode democratic ideals. Briefly: * Bollinger and Pictet present a case study of a decision on the management of the Orbe Plain in Switzerland which faces regular flooding. They identify issues of legitimacy, power and the need to address these in building successful applications of (e-)democracy. * Geldermann and Rentz draw on their experiences in developing the use of the web to exchange information on environmental decisions to consider some of the issues facing the development of e-democracy. * Gronlund takes us to task, pointing out that the technical issues of taking MCDA methods into e-democracy may pale into insignificance when compared with the social, behavioural and communication issues relating to the democratic process itself. * H. a am. a al. a ainen describes the www.decisionarium. hut.fi website, which is currently the best exemplar of web-enabled decision analytic, discussion and voting tools. * Kracik and Karny take a normative and mathematical view of the issue of defining fair democratic structures which draw together the information provided by citizens on their preferences for different strategies. * Kersten looks from a socio-technical perspective at user issues in designing e-democracy systems. * Lotov discusses issues relating to the involvement of lay stakeholders in environmental decision making, describing a web-enabled MCDA tool and using as an example a case study of large-scale water management project in the former USSR based on partial diversion of the flow of Northern Russian rivers into the Volga River basin. * Moreno-Jim! e enez and Polasek look at many issues relating to the growth of various formats * D. Rios Insua, Holgado and Moreno look to e-negotiation systems as a basis for e-democracy. * Rosqvist revisits Keeney and Raiffa's concept of a supra decision maker to articulate the process of social decision making and explores how this might be used.
These papers tackle challenging issues, ones that we must face if we are eventually to reap the benefits offered to democracy by modern Internet technologies.