The European Citizens' Initiative ECI is a potential milestone in citizen engagement on the European level introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon. Directed towards the European Commission an ECI requires 1 m support declarations, for details see Regulation 211/2011. Support declarations may be issued on paper or online, where the online mode seems particularly suitable to the pan-European character of an ECI.

The Regulation required the Commission to provide an open source collection software (the Online Collection System OCS) to be downloaded and operated by the organisers. e-voting.at analyed this piece of software - here the evaluation report.

Regulation 211/2011 provided that iniatives could start collecting declarations as of April 2012. The software, however, had serious issues that this had to be abandoned (see the statement issued by Gerald Häfner, MEP.  The Commission announced to host the software on their own server infrastructure for the time being.