Advanced social media exploitation in public policy formulation: methods, tools and evaluations
Public policy formulation is the process aiming to design policies to address societal problems and needs, and involves many stakeholders with different needs, views, perceptions and expectations. In the contemporary societies, which are more and more heterogeneous and pluralistic in terms of cultur...
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| Κύριοι συγγραφείς: | , |
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| Άλλοι συγγραφείς: | |
| Γλώσσα: | en_US |
| Δημοσίευση: |
2019
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| Θέματα: | |
| Διαθέσιμο Online: | http://hdl.handle.net/11610/19557 |
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| Περίληψη: | Public policy formulation is the process aiming to design policies to address societal problems and needs, and involves many stakeholders with different needs, views, perceptions and expectations. In the contemporary societies, which are more and more heterogeneous and pluralistic in terms of culture, values, concerns and lifestyles and problems are becoming more acute, the complexity of this process is propagated. To address this complexity, government institutions of various levels have started experimenting with more participative forms of public policy making, adopting methods that increase citizens’ and stakeholders’ involvement in the processes and allow the incorporation of their knowledge into governmental decisions. The high penetration of Internet and particularly, the rapid growth of Social Media usage by citizens for publishing public policy related content and exchanging relevant political opinions have generated great opportunities in this direction. Boosted also by the advent of the e-participation paradigm, a sub-field of e-government, diverse methods of systematic utilisation of Social Media and Web 2.0 techniques in governance have emerged. Their aim is to support public policy formulation and foster public participation, by leveraging the wealth of knowledge that is hidden in the Social Web. As the level of citizen’s participation in such media has been continually exploding, growing potentials have been raised for such methods to access and make the best use of the “wisdom of the crowd”.
Although, initially Social Media were used by governments mainly as communication channels, over the years they have become major components of more sophisticated practices for strengthening interactions between government and citizens. These methods of Social Media exploitation in public policy formulation, rely on paradigms with evidence of success in the private sector, such as crowdsourcing, social media monitoring and analysis, social and open innovation. The majority of initiatives following these paradigms reported, are enabled through especially designed ICT platforms integrating different set of technologies and tools. However, the limited knowledge on how these paradigms can be efficiently and effectively performed in the special context of the public sector supported by appropriate platforms, necessitates the development of approaches and methodologies for the application of such ideas and concepts in government for supporting problem solving and policy making, taking into account its special needs and specificities.
This research contributes to filling this research gap, by introducing advanced methods and practices of social media exploitation in public policy making processes and evaluating them from various perspectives in order to develop new knowledge in the “Social Media in Government” area and in general in the scientific filed of e-participation. In particular, three ICT-based methods have been developed in this direction. The first implements the concept of ‘active crowdsourcing’, in which government has an active role, posing a particular social problem or public policy direction in a governmental website or social media account, and soliciting relevant information, knowledge, opinions and ideas from citizens, who provide content in there. The second one relies on ‘passive crowdsourcing’, in which government has a more passive role, monitoring and collecting content on a specific topic or public policy (existing or under development) that has been freely generated by citizens without any stimulation in external various sources not owned by government. The retrieved content is then subjected to sophisticated processing, in order to extract from it relevant knowledge and opinions of citizens. Finally, the third method is based on the automated retrieval of information about experts on various policy related topics (expert-sourcing), as well as relevant online texts and postings already published by such experts in multiple social media and web-sites. Hence, the latter two do not require from people to create new content, instead they conduct selective ‘passive’ crowdsourcing. While, the major distinction of the third method is that it targets to the accumulation of high quality policy-related knowledge produced by experts in comparison with the two previous methods, which target the general public (so called citizen-sourcing), aiming to collect policy relevant knowledge and perceptions from it.
The proposed methods have been designed upon the principles of the crowdsourcing paradigm, integrating a set of notions linked with the e-participation domain, for unlocking public and experts’ knowledge and innovation capacity. Moreover, all methods encompass sophisticated techniques for processing and filtering the retrieved content, in order to extract the most significant and highest quality parts of it that can provide meaningful insights for the policy formulation process. For instance, they employ text/opinion mining techniques to identify attitudes or sentiment of citizens against policy topics and reputation management techniques to extract views that have been authored by the most knowledgeable experts. Therefore, the technical part of current research relies on toolsets combining state-of-the-art results from multiple ICT sub-fields (Policy Modelling, Data Mining, Visualisation, Argumentation, Decision Support, Dynamic Simulation etc.). The role of Social Media remains on the core of all three methods, serving as the communication channels between government and societal actors, in order to facilitate better understanding of social needs, expectations, opinions and judgements and transform them to improvements on governmental decisions.
After their design, the above methods have been applied in real policy scenarios under close collaboration with governmental actors (Members of national and European parliaments, public officials, etc.) in order to identify strengths, barriers, limitations and appropriate improvements and adaptations regarding their systematic integration in the governmental functions and procedures. The results revealed that although there are a number of risks associated with the application of the approaches (e.g. credibility of accumulated information, manipulation of crowd), they are in general considered as more effective and efficient methods for reaching wider and more diverse audiences at lower cost and with good potentials of diffusion. Furthermore, the proposed approaches allow overcoming the usual ‘information overload’ problems of the traditional e-participation approaches, as the processing methods they include are capable of extracting the main points of the collected content. With these findings, it is aimed to analyse and assess the overall impact of this approach in policy making across Europe and its transition to collaborative decision-making. Ultimately, a framework is suggested that prescribes interoperation of different methods and tools along the policy formulation stages for providing decision support to policy makers and social actors. Therefore, the research provides contributions, which are useful to both researchers on the implicated domains and practitioners dealing with the public sector.
The present research unfolds as a multi-case study, synthesizing the overall evidence on the implicated research areas across the different applications of the three methods conceived. We build room for several iterations into our research process, where the designs of each case study were repeated during the analysis to reach final conclusions. Finally, the insights derived from both quantitative and qualitative data collection efforts were synthesized followed by discussions on key findings. |
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