Aggeliki Androutsopoulou, Francesco Mureddu,

Euripidis Loukis, Yannis Charalabidis

PASSIVE EXPERT-SOURCING FOR POLICY

MAKING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

15th IFIP Electronic Government (EGOV) and8th Electronic Participation (ePart) Conference 2016

5th - 8th September 2016 Guimarães, Portugal

Introduction

• Crowd-sourcing: a web-based business model that harnesses

the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals’, in

order to exploit ‘collective wisdom’ and mine fresh ideas from

large numbers of individuals (Brabham, 2012)

• Citizen-sourcing: Application of the crowdsourcing ideas by

the public sector, the politicians and the citizens, during a policy

making process

• Further research required on public sector citizen-sourcing, to

develop a considerable knowledge base, comparable to private

sector crowd-sourcing

Introduction

• Citizen-sourcing initiatives provide valuable insights into the

perceptions of the general public, concerning important social

problems and government activities for addressing them

• Targeting to more knowledgeable communities having strong

interest and good expertise on the particular topic/policy under

discussion to collect information and knowledge of higher

quality

Public Sector Citizen-Sourcing

• Active citizen-sourcing: use of government agencies’ web-sites or social media accounts, in order to pose a particular social problem or public policy direction, and solicit relevant information, knowledge, opinions and ideas from citizens.

• Challenge.gov initiative, U.S. Office of Management and Budget

• The PADGETS project, EU

• Passive citizen-sourcing: exploit political content that has been developed by citizens freely, without any direct stimulation or direction by government, in various external web-sites or social media

• The NOMAD project, EU

Democracy vs Technocracy in Public Policy Making

• Increased complexity of social problems leads to the

establishment of expert bodies to support policy formulation

• Two fundamental bases of public policy making:

• Democracy - political consultation with stakeholder groups (diverse

values and concerns, perspectives and ideologies )

• Technocracy - knowledge of experts

• Necessity of combined and balanced input and knowledge

exchange between the two, which, luckily, can be supported

by ICT

Research Objectives

• ICT-based method for ‘passive expert-sourcing’, which allows the

collection of high quality policy relevant information, knowledge and

ideas from knowledgeable experts with the in order to support policy

making by the EU by leveraging its large policy community, based on:

• EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management,

• relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating,

• Several means of visualisation

• Theoretical foundation:

• relationships between democracy and technocracy

• policy networks in public policy making

Policy Networks

• Sets of formal and informal institutional linkages between

governmental actors and non-government actors associations,

professions, labor unions and interest groups) around shared

interests in public policy-making

• Non-state actors provide to state actors information,

knowledge, expertise and support for the formulation and

implementation of public policies. In return they have the

opportunity to influence the public policies

• ICT increases density of policy networks interactions and

supports the exchange of diverse expertise and knowledge

among participants

Design and Evaluation Methodology

13 workshops (EurActiv)

• EU policy stakeholders and thematic experts

• Understanding the EU policy community structure

• Requirements Elicitation

Evaluation Session

• Usage scenarios execution

• Questionnaires on the evaluation framework

• Qualitative discussion on questions

Passive Expert-sourcing Method

• Automatic retrieval of information from various sources concerning policy experts and content generated by them

• Opinion mining and sentiment classification of content to identify subjectivity, opinions and their polarity, relevance to a policy topic

• Digital Reputation Management to asses the credibility of experts

• Modelling of policy processes (EU legislative procedures or complex political debates)

• Interconnection and structured visual presentation of all relevant information

ICT Platform - EurActory

• Maintains a directory of profiles of people

having an active role in EU policy making

• Crawls at regular time intervals external

sources and SM and stores information in

CurActory DB

• Provides ranking of expert profiles per topic

through Reputation Management

• Provides capabilities of searching, filtering,

curation and activation of user profile

Digital Reputation Criteria

1. Self-evaluation: direct input from the user on his/her own area of expertise.

2. Peer-assessment: based on endorsements from other users made through EurActory

3. Business Card Reputation: based on the reputation ranking of the organization and the user’s position in the organization’s hierarchy

4. Document Assessment: results of authored documents’ assessment by their readers

5. Network Value: level of influence as the sum of network connections

6. Proximity trust: level of connection in social media7. Past Measurements: taking into account reputation in previous

months (its stability means credibility).8. Offline Reputation: manually added for persons with no online

presence

ICT Platform - PolicyLine

• Timeline visualisation of main

documents (based on

relevance and author’s

reputation) per policy process

• Clusters documents under user

defined stages of the policy

process

• Classifies documents per

authorship (sub)categories

• Provides sentiment

classification results and users’

feedback per document

• Provides statistical Information

for each policy process

Evaluation Framework

Technology Acceptance

Model

Intention to use

Ease of Use

Usefulness

Evaluation Results – EurActoryEase of Use

EurActory can be easily used without assistanceCreating a profile is easy It is easy to access topic listingsIt is easy to rate peersUsing EurActory has been a positive experience

3.464.084.153.754.08

Usefulness

EurActory puts together information not found or collected under one roof elsewhereEurActory allows me to be more productiveEurActory improves the quality of my work EurActory assists me in identifying relevant expertsEurActory provides me with all the needed information on relevant expertsEurActory enables me to reinforce my expert positioning

3.153.383.463.853.543.54

Intention to Use

I expect to use EurActory on a regular basis in the futureI will advise colleagues to use EurActory

3.853.62

Evaluation Results – PolicyLineEase of Use

PolicyLine can be easily used without assistanceI can easily create a ‘policy process’I can easily add a document in the ‘policy process’I can easily rate/comment a document I can easily get an overview of the process Using PolicyLine has been a positive experience

3.643.693.793.53.733.71

Usefulness

PolicyLine puts together information not found or collected under one roof elsewherePolicyLine allows me to be more productivePolicyLine improves the quality of my work

3.29

3.29

3.43

Intention to Use

I expect to use EurActory on a regular basis in the futureI will advise colleagues to use EurActory

4.143.71

Conclusions• Passive expert-sourcing, combined with automated reputation

management and opinion mining can assist the public debate and

policy making.

• Two tools were developed: Euractory and PolicyLine, for finding high

quality information and opinions on important policy-related topics and

policy formulation processes in European Commission and European

Parliament

• The users (politicians, experts, citizens) had an initial positive

response towards the provided tools, in many different occasions.

• Promotes the debate and communication among EU policy

stakeholders, allowing expression of opinions and criticism on EU

policy initiatives

• Future improvements on the ICT platform concerning the graphical

interface and timeline visualisation are now being

Further Research

• Further evaluation on realistic pilot applications

• to what extent it enables and supports the transfer of information, knowledge and

proposals from experts to the participants in the democratic processes of modern

policy making, and under what conditions?

• to what extent it can enable and support the exchange of information, knowledge

and proposals among the participants in public policy networks, and under what

conditions ?

• to what extent can this method can assist the EU institutions to collect high quality

information, knowledge, opinions and proposals from their policy networks

• Further research concerning the reverse transfer of knowledge, from

the democratic process to experts, towards more multi-dimensional

comprehensive experts’ analysis and plans on social problems and

public policies

The research presented in this paper has been conducted as part of

the European research project ‘EU-Community’, partially funded

by the ‘ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling’ research

programme of the EU

http://project.eucommunity.eu/

Contact me at:

Email ; yannisx@aegean.gr

Twitter : @yannisc