Information Polity

Both candidates and voters have increased their use of the Internet for political campaigns. Candidates have adopted many internet tools, including social networking websites, for the purposes of communicating with constituents and voters, collecting donations, fostering community, and organizing events. On the other side, voters have adopted Internet tools such as blogs and social networking sites to relate to candidates, engage in political dialogue, pursue activist causes, and share information. In this paper we examine two years of posts on the Facebook walls of the three major contenders for the U.S. Presidency in 2008: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. We analyze participation patterns of usage along dimensions of breadth and frequency, and interpret them in terms of the concept of the "public sphere".

Impact assessment (IA) is a key method for the legislator to evaluate policies, norms or regulations currently under development. Experts use IA to gather and analyze input from many individuals to obtain clear problem statements, estimations regarding policies etc., and use this information to compare policy alternatives. Currently, the opinions, expertise etc. gathered for IA need to be structured by hand. Thus, the analysis steps of IA are time-consuming, and IA does not scale with the number of persons involved. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative approach for IA. Based on a Web 2.0 architecture, we let a community of individuals derive the potential, downsides and design alternatives of policies collaboratively. Our approach guides individuals through the process of creating structured input. Our approach is fully implemented, and we have evaluated it together with legal experts by means of a small pilot study. Our evaluation indicates that the acceptance of a Web 2.0-based IA application strongly depends on the user interface. More profoundly, it shows that our approach can be an important tool for future IA.

Noise pollution is a major problem in cities around the world. The current methods to assess it neglect to represent the real exposure experienced by the citizens themselves, and therefore could lead to wrong conclusions and a biased representations. In this paper we present a novel approach to monitor noise pollution involving the general public. Using their mobile phones as noise sensors, we provide a low cost solution for the citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment and participate in the creation of collective noise maps by sharing their geo-localized and annotated measurements with the community. Our prototype, called NoiseTube, can be found online [1].

Social networks change the way users relate on the Web. One type of social network is the virtual community, which has a social structure that connects citizens and the government. Integrating consultation and deliberative environments for popular participation in democratic issues and creating virtual communities to enhance member relationships makes it possible to model decision-making processes. This was behind the development, testing and analyzing of the Democratic Citizenship Community (DCC). The DCC has interaction and communication resources such as citizens' profiles, debate, voting, an information library, a social space and users' help. An experimental analysis generated discussion about and suggestions for improving the interaction and communication resources.

Collaboration and information sharing among government organizations is becoming increasingly important for promoting efficiency and productivity as well as for enhancing citizen services. With Internet connectivity widely available and with the ease-of-use of social media tools, citizens actively participate in producing content. However, the abundance of content causes another problem for governments – the difficulty of determining what truly useful and relevant information is to be shared for mission critical tasks and to produce better citizen services. Information resources, such as data, documents, multimedia objects and services stored in different agencies and produced by citizens need to be easily discovered and shared. We propose a data model of rich social tags and a Citizen-Government collaborative tagging environment} where governments and citizens can collaboratively annotate the resources, thus facilitating collaboration responsiveness through accessibility to information. The collaborative annotations capture not only the semantics but also the pragmatic and social aspects related to the resources, such as who, when, where, how and for what related tasks the resources are shared. The benefits of the a rich tag data model emphasizing the relationships of a tag to semantic, social, pragmatic and contextual reference frames include the ability to filter, discover and search new and dynamic as well as hidden resources, to navigate between resources in a search by traversing semantic relationships, and to recommend the most relevant government information even when distributed over different agencies. A distributed architecture of a government collaborative tagging system is proposed and tag-based search and recommendations are illustrated.

The increasing use of social media by governments for improving citizen access to information, participation of stakeholders in policy processes and delivery of customer-focused services are among the defining features of the so-called "Governance 2.0" phenomenon. Another feature is the interaction between existing government networks and social networks of citizens and policy actors in order to disseminate government information and seek contributions from citizens and other actors to policies, decisions and services. This article examines the semantic issues associated with the emerging Governance 2.0 networks. It evolves an architectural framework to guide governments and their agencies in developing semantic interoperability capabilities. We approach the problem by first developing a conceptual model for analyzing semantic interoperability requirements in general. Next, we provide a case study to generate interesting scenarios and identify concrete semantic interoperability issues arising from the interactions between citizens, businesses and government through traditional and electronic channels and different forms of social media. Subsequently, we present a Semantic Interoperability Architecture Framework to address these issues based on existing government semantic interoperability frameworks and semantic standards for Web 2.0. After validating the prescribed framework, we discuss how it could be used in practice by governments.

For many standard as well as emerging criminal law Web 2.0 applications, such as the development of mashups and dataspace systems, privacy preserving data integration is of crucial importance. In many organizations different databases contain different kinds of data concerning the same entity. This may have several good reasons. However, to have an integral and unified view of an entity, data reconciliation is of crucial importance. In this paper, we present an approach for data reconciliation that is based on available schemata of data sources and the content of the sources. The different schemata of data sources are used to determine what parts of the schemata pertain to the same entity type. The content of the sources is used to determine the association between different attributes stored in different sources. In establishing the relationships between different attributes, we have exploited the knowledge of domain experts as well. On the basis of the collected information, we identify a common set of attributes with regard to the data sources. A similarity function is associated to each attribute, which takes a record from each data source as input and computes a similarity value as output expressing how "similar" the records are. Depending on the similarity value, we decide whether or not to reconcile two entities. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by means of a real-life case in the field of police and justice. Our approach can be applied to support the development of a wide variety of criminal law applications, such as data warehouses, mashups, and dataspace systems.

Web 2.0 in its various shades is being embraced in the domain of e-government; sophisticated transaction services are becoming mainstream interactions and creating new challenges, particularly regarding security and privacy. The emerging field of electronic identity management (e-IDM) addresses these issues, while governments are introducing e-IDM systems at national level to support service provision. This paper conceptualizes the transition to such a system in Austria as a "system innovation" and uses the approach of"actor-centered institutionalism" to analyze the innovation process and its outcome. It identifies major particularities of the Austrian system such as the technology-neutral approach using multiple tokens and an ID-model with special provisions for privacy protection, traces their origin in the interplay of institutional context and actor constellations and assesses the pattern of this transformation. The current system represents a niche innovation, indeed with a transformation pattern implying considerable change for public administration as well as for citizens. Still controversial privacy implications and insufficient user value, reflected in slow take-up, remain the challenges. The system innovation perspective proved particularly valuable in identifying demands for adaptation by revealing barriers in the transition process towards the e-IDMS.

Improving public service delivery is a very complex domain and the complexity is difficult to grasp by stakeholders having various degree of knowledge and involvement. An emergent and promising method for dealing with complex problems is simulation gaming, which can be used to capitalize the intrinsic experiences and knowledge of people and mobilize their creativity to come up with new solutions. A simulation game refers to a situation in which human participants play a role and follow rules of play to simulate complex situations. We developed a simulation game for the field of public-private service delivery. The purpose of the game is to facilitate public organizations to get to the core of problems in service delivery and to stimulate the collaborative development of innovative solutions for public service delivery. Playing the game at a municipality shows that the game is suitable for creating awareness and for the identification and development of alternative solutions. The game can be used to substitute the "authoritative-know-all" approach by a"wisdom of the crowds" approach, incorporating the social collaboration that is a key concept in Web 2.0 thinking.