The Interactive Policy Making, or IPM, is an online opinion poll

Opinion poll

An opinion poll, sometimes simply referred to as a poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence...

 management system launched in 2001, which is used to gather the opinion of European Union

European Union

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...

 citizens and entreprises regarding policy development The software is part of the Interactive Policy Making Initiative and is made of various modules

Modular design

Modular design, or "modularity in design" is an approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts that can be independently created and then used in different systems to drive multiple functionalities...

 which assist in the creation of such questionnaires - including a creation, translation, test, launch and analysis module.

History

The European Commission

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....

 started using the system at the end of 2001, and introduced it to the public through the "Your Voice in Europe" program.

In 2002, prior to the launch of the top-level domain

Top-level domain

A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

 .eu

.eu

.eu is the country code top-level domain for the European Union . Launched 7 December 2005, the domain is available for organisations in and residents of EU member states. The TLD is administered by EURid, a consortium consisting of the national ccTLD registry operators of Belgium, Sweden, Italy...

, the European Commission used IPM to gather the opinion of companies regarding cybersquatting.

In 2006, the European Commission released IPM OSS, an open source version of the software aimed at companies and private organizations.