wegov presentation at samos 2010 summit
TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCING THE WEGOV PROJECT
Athina VrakatseliMarketing Communications
Gov2u
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the SEVENTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME THEME ICT 2009.7.3 ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling
Table of contents• Room for improvements• WeGov Added value• Information exchange with social network sites• Analytics of online discussions• Communication models and tools• Opinion and Discussion Toolbox• Live field trials• Dissemination and Exploitation
Room for improvementsSocial networking platforms• public uptake has seen explosive growth over the past years.• potential: achieve unprecedented levels of outreach for policy
makers to the citizen (breadth, depth, inclusion, speed, interaction and engagement).
eParticipation platforms• challenge: how to involve a larger number of affected
individuals, groups and communities in discussions than is currently achieved through dedicated web sites.
• Unanswered practical issues: trust, bias, privacy, misuse and how to effectively extract representative opinions that cover the diversity of participant viewpoints.
WeGov Added value • Allow eGovernment and NGOs to extract information from, and inject
discussions and facts, into social platforms. • Allow eGovernment to better understand eSociety by providing new
tools for analysing discussions.• Provide new tools for increasing the participation of eGovernment in
political discussion processes of the eSociety.• WeGov is a Software-as-a-Service model based on open source
software deployed on cloud infrastructure (e.g. Amazon S3 and EC2) -sustainable, scalable and low cost.
• WeGov will provide a methodology and best practices collection that will allow future eGovernment to easily adopt the government toolbox.
Information exchange with SNSDevelop extraction and injection tools for information and content exchange with a wide range of social network sites in a way that adheres to privacy and safeguarding measures.
SNS being engaged within the remit of the WeGov project are:
Analytics of online discussions The aim is to develop analytics tools so discussions on government policies can be understood by participants in online communities.
•Understanding the subject of discussions e.g. a topic of a discussion and opinions expressed by people and how they are related to it.•Understanding the people and groups involved in the debate through diagnostics that indicate discussion health e.g. number or people involved, any attempts to manipulate a discussion.•Understanding the direction and dynamics of the discussion and e.g. if the discussion is diverging, converging, going in circles, splintering, or influenced heavily by some individual.•Understanding the balance of the discussion, e.g. its range of opinions or its weighing of different points of view.
Communication models and toolsDevelop tools and processes for effective engagement of policy makers with citizens in online communities.
•How to capture and automate the process of communication between policy makers and citizens in a structured way •How to model peoples’ behavior in order to inform decision making on promoting healthy discussion and •How to best place content into social network sites in order to stimulate a discussion.
Opinion and Discussion Toolbox
Develop a dashboard for live visualisation of discussions, using service-oriented models on cloud-infrastructures for scalability and performance.
It will also determine how end users can access these tools in an integrated way using a ‘live view dashboard’ for policy makers, and how to organize and operate the toolbox as a service on cloud infrastructures in order to achieve the necessary scalability and performance for large scale discussions across multiple social network sites.
Live field trialsSuccess will be measured through three live field trials (diversity of opinion on consumer policy, health service delivery, and public policy research in the social sciences) that will be conducted in Spain, Germany and UK as follows.•The first field trial will be developed in UK and will be looking at an online health service comment site as well as address the efficacy of policy makers and their communication strategies with regard to citizens (Hansard Society).•The second field trial will involve discussions around consumer policy in Spain and Germany (Gov2u).•The third field trial will apply the toolbox for investigating its usage as a complement to political opinion polls in Germany (GESIS).
• The three application scenarios will provide examples of how the outputs of the project will be used. • The trials’ results will be combined into a methodology, including a
legal and ethical analysis (e.g. privacy, data protection, defamation); risks of using Social Network sites from different stakeholder perspectives including use of technical countermeasures (e.g. pseudo-anonymisation). • Stakeholders involved directly during the project.• Results of using WeGov can be compared with other approaches.
At the end of the project, WeGov will provide a methodology and best practices collection that will allow future eGovernment to easily adopt the government toolbox.
Mock-ups
Dissemination and Exploitation The strategic groupings for external communications are:•those involved in policy making or government (MEPs, parliaments, local councils etc.)•those involved in technology (ICT industry and researchers)•those who are experts (e.g. legal) •those who provide infrastructures (e.g. SNS platforms, cloud providers etc.) •those who are citizens or are expressing some form of viewpoint that (e.g. individuals) policy makers or social analysts want to listen to •media
