ICT TOOLS AND SOCIETY INVOLVEMENT AMONG THE EUPAN NETWORK

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SURVEY RESULTS

TANYA CHETCUTI AND MARCO FICHERA - WORKSHOPEUROPEAN COMMISSION

AGENDA

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• Objective of the survey

• Survey results

• Next steps – ISA Action 2.18

• The purpose of the questionnaire, prepared by the European Commission in collaboration with the Latvian presidency, is to identify the ICT tools of open and collaborative government used in EUPAN member states, focusing on:

• e-Participation in decision-making processes: ICT tools enabling crowd-sourcing of ideas, submission of proposals or supporting citizen initiatives and gathering of citizen feedback, in the context of new or amended legislative acts and other issues related to democracy.

• Improvement of the provision of public services: ICT tools aiming at increasing citizen engagement and feedback for better service delivery.

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Objectives of the Survey (1)

• Our goal is to:

• Understand what functionalities are provided by the ICT tools used in European administrations. For example, if advanced functionalities like text mining or data analytics are used to extract knowledge from the data submitted by citizens.

• Gather best practices and achievements as well as the challenges, including legal issues such as liability and credibility.

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Objectives of the Survey (2)

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Survey results (2)

Highlights

• Almost all respondents have stated that, in their administration, ICT tools are used in the context of electronic participation for decision-making or improvement of provision of public services.

• More than 20% use four or more ICT tools.

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Survey results (2)

Highlights

• Submission of structured information by the user (e.g. via a web form) is the most common way of gathering input for the tools.

• Most of the tools also allow submission of unstructured documents and files, and are able to produce reports.

• A few tools provide advanced functionalities like text and data analytics.

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Survey results (3)

Highlights

• Only a few tools are integrated with external sources of information (e.g. RSS feeds or official information source like the national gazette)

• Tools are only relying only on the information provided by the users

Survey Results (4)

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Highlights• Most of the data collected via the

tools are published to be used by the general public or by partner institutions.

• Usually, data is made available through ad-hoc web pages. Only a limited number of tools support integration with other systems or publishing of information in machine-readable format to encourage automatic re-use.

ISA Action 2.18PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE FOR SUPPORTING DECISION MAKING

Main challenge

• Acquiring citizens’ opinions is a challenging task since they are often expressed in an unstructured way on different platforms. It is even more difficult and expensive to extract meaningful knowledge that can be used as input to decision making.

• Data must be gathered, measured and analysed through discovery and analytics tools, which makes it possible to identify trends, issues and challenges. For instance, data coming from interactions on social media contribute towards factors other than evidence.

Objectives of the action

• The main objective of this action is to consolidate and integrate existing reusable tools that allow the electronic participation of stakeholders, the analysis of the captured opinions and the discovery and generation of knowledge. This knowledge will in turn be used as input to existing decision making, making them data-driven processes.

• It is not the objective of this action to replace existing stakeholder consultation tools (such as EU Survey, Your Voice in Europe or the similar tools in the Member States) but to give additional value to them by providing further capabilities for analysing big quantities of semi-structured or unstructured information.

ISA Action 2.18PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE FOR SUPPORTING DECISION MAKING

Objectives of the action

• The support the main objective of the action, the three following specific objectives are set out:

• To cooperate with Member States and related networks, for instance EUPAN, in order to better identify the technology needs of public administrations when acquiring stakeholders opinions as a driving force for open governments.

• To assess different assets that are currently available for making them accessible, thus allowing for collaboration, transparency and participation.

• To consolidate and integrate open and reusable software solutions that will support the interactive knowledge sharing and will allow the elicitation of citizens’ opinions and perceptions which is hidden in tacit knowledge.

ISA Action 2.18PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE FOR SUPPORTING DECISION MAKING