DEMOS (Delphi Online Mediation System) is a complex application available on Wornex's WorldDirector platform that provides an environment that assists the management of discussions and decision making through the web, especially when involving a large population (e.g., a community using the web to debate about city issues) or small groups of experts. DEMOS is based on the integration of three well-proven methods of social research: the Delphi method, Survey techniques, and Mediation method. These are supported by a set of tools (user interface, forum management, survey organization, and clustering), integrated in a layered architecture and adapted to multiple languages: the current version is working on English, German and Italian. The approach and the system was successfully validated at two trial sites, the City of Hamburg (Germany) and the City of Bologna (Italy).

DEMOS is aimed at researching and developing a technology for the mass market or for small groups of experts. All the users involved in any internet mediated discussion process could be a DEMOS end user : citizens, consumers, employees, forum members. Hence, the potential customers of DEMOS are the companies and organisations that provide DEMOS services to the public.: Administrations, Consumer Opinion Platform, Market Research Companies.

The DEMOS system provides a state-of-the-art set of features for e-participation but is ready for the market and does not depend on any technology that is beyond the state-of-the-art of products readily available on the market.

DEMOS goes beyond the usual Internet chat or discussion forums to provide a powerful and integrated methodology and socio-computational system with the following configurable and customisable state-of-the-art features to support large-scale public participation in political discourses on the Web:

• unstructured iterative discussion sessions and structured debates with oal-directed cycles, organised and controlled by a moderator or a group of moderators
• differentiated user roles and access rights
• modes for communication and feedback (direct/indirect, public/protected)
• support for differentiated types of user-interaction
• sorting and aggregating quantitative data and qualitative semantic content (free answers, comments and statements)
• participative "bottom up" specification of issues, construction of questionnaires, and selection of experts
• conflict resolution strategies allowing differentiated outcomes (convergence,consensus, divergence, "rational dissent")
• self-organization and subgroup formation allowing different levels of aggregation and distribution
• methods facilitating the maintenance of process coherence and coordination in the face of large numbers of participants with high fluctuation rates.