Aggeliki Androutsopoulou

Passive crowdsourcing in government using social media

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on “passive crowdsourcing” by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy. Design/methodology/approach – This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews. Findings – A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach...

Fostering Social Innovation through Multiple Social Media Combinations

Social innovation requires extensive networking, communication, and collaboration among various social actors. This article presents an approach to fostering and supporting social innovation through the combined exploitation of multiple social media. Furthermore, a methodology is developed for evaluating this approach, based on sound theoretical foundations: The wicked problems theory and the diffusion of innovation theory. This methodology is used for evaluating three pilot applications of this approach, organized in cooperation with members of the European Parliament.

Passive Expert-Sourcing for Policy Making in the European Union

The public sector gradually starts exploiting the crowdsourcing ideas initially developed in the private sector. However, there is much less knowledge on efficient and effective methods and practices for public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with private sector crowd-sourcing, so extensive research is required in this area. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an ICT-based method for ‘passive expert-sourcing’, with the latter term denoting the collection of policy relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts, which aims at supporting policy making by the European Union (EU) by leveraging its large policy community. Its theoretical foundation is previous theoretical work on the relationships between democracy and technocracy, and also on policy networks. The main technological pillars of the proposed method are: EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management, relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them. Finally, a first evaluation of the proposed method is presented, leading to encouraging results.

An Open Data and Open Services Repository for Supporting Citizen-Driven Application Development for Governance

Open data portals have been a primary source for publishing datasets from various sectors of administration, all over the world. However, making open data available does not necessarily lead to better utilisation from citizens and businesses. Our paper presents a new framework and a prototype system for supporting open application development by citizen communities, through gathering and making available open data and open web services sources from governmental actors, combined with an application development environment, training material and application examples.

Policy Informatics in the Social Media Era: Analyzing Opinions for Policy Making.

In order to address the complexity of the modern social problems and needs through effective public policies, government agencies have started experimenting with policy informatics methods, adopting various approaches that increase citizens’ and stakeholders’ participation in the public policy formulation processes. Such approaches allow the exploitation of their opinions, which incorporate valuable perceptions of them, as well as knowledge, proposals and ideas. This paper outlines three advanced methods of social media (SM) exploitation in public policy making processes for citizen-sourcing, which are based on the concepts of active citizen-sourcing, passive citizen-sourcing and passive expert-sourcing respectively, as well as the conclusions from some first applications of them. Based on them a comparison of these methods is conducted, and then a maturity model is developed concerning the use of SM for citizen-sourcing in order to support policy making.

Public Services Reengineering Through Cost Analysis and Simulation: The eGOVSIM II Platform

Formal methods for measuring the impact of transformation of public services to digital transactions is an important research challenge in the non-bureaucratic government. The eGOVSIM II toolset is a prototype Web-based application aiming to provide administrations with a methodology and an information system to calculate the gains from automating and delivering interoperable services for citizens and businesses. The chapter presents the eGOVSIM II platform, which has been developed on the basis of the eGOVSIM analytical cost calculation and simulation model. It is based on the SCM and ABC methods and has extensive capabilities in capturing and measuring the various cost elements of governmental services, calculating both the cost for the administrations and the citizens or enterprises, in different levels and scenarios of automation. The eGOVSIM II platform facilitates the definition of several service provision scenarios, allowing the calculation of time, effort, and cost elements of each scenario. The chapter provides a full view of the publicly available system and its functionalities, by showcasing an application scenario testing the reengineering of public services in a Greek Public Sector organization. Results from this application and different scenarios executed in the past are showcased to provide a view on the applicability and overall value of the approach. Finally, lessons learned and future research directions for cost estimation are described.

Technocracy to Democracy Knowledge Transfer Using Social Media and Reputation Management

Previous political sciences research has highlighted the importance of both ‘democracy’ (democratic processes and consultation with stakeholder groups) and ‘technocracy’ (specialized knowledge of experts) as main foundations for the development of effective public policies, and the need for balance as well as interaction between them. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for supporting this exchange can be highly beneficial. Our paper makes a contribution in this direction, by evaluating an ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method that has been developed for supporting the transfer of knowledge from ‘technocracy’ (i.e. knowledgeable experts) to ‘democracy’ (i.e. participants of the democratic processes, such as citizens’ representatives, elected officials and various public policies’ stakeholder groups). This method exploits policy-related content that has already been published by experts in numerous social media, adopting a selective approach (filtering this content in order to extract the highest quality parts of it that have been authored by the most knowledgeable experts) based on reputation management techniques. From the evaluation of this ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method useful conclusions have been drawn concerning its strengths and weaknesses, as well as directions for the improvement of it and the enhancement of its value.