EU-wide harmonization of immigration policies is a long standing and challenging issue, given the need to compromise numerous national immigration policy proposals, practices and procedures towards common, balanced, harmonized and effective EU policies. The challenge stems primarily from the legal, political, technological and societal differences in the various Member States, as well as from the isolation of legal immigrants from the policy making processes and the formulation of balanced migration proposals. Collaboration between various stakeholders including politicians and decision makers, but also citizens and the civil society, is deemed essential to alleviate the heterogeneity of the various policies, regulations and viewpoints. Despite this need, nowadays there are no proven and easy ways to ensure the participation and collaboration of all stakeholders, while current policy making processes take barely this need into account.
Latest ICT developments, such as Web2.0, collaborative knowledge management, provide numerous opportunities for participatory governance and citizen-generated policy making. Furthermore, they can boost innovation in terms of both policy making models and decision support tools. In view of these developments, ImmigrationPolicy2.0 will pilot tools, techniques, solutions and overall services for collaborative development of immigration policies, as well as for supporting related decisions. The project will pay emphasis in the provision and piloting of ICT infrastructures enabling identification, modelling, analysis, visualization, monitoring and harmonization of diverse policies and viewpoints in a secure and reliable fashion. Overall, ImmigrationPolicy2.0 will effectively integrate ICT tools in existing policy making and decision support processes, while at the same time focusing on reshaping these processes in order to ensure active participation from all stakeholders. [+]