Singapore Policy-Making Processes

In Singapore, ICT plays a key role in enabling technology for most of the sectors, several initiatives have been launched to gather insights from these large amount of data, and the utilization of visual solutions as a means to provide useful insights represents the basis for policymakers' decisions. In addition, Singapore is promoting the usage of new channels of communications to optimise the processes of e-Participation, to enhance public inputs in governmental activities, and other initiatives to gather insights from geo-spatial, behavioural, commercial, and scientific data. This chapter provides an overview about Singapore IT strategy development and the relation between government and key stakeholders to define and establish new policies, governance, and the framework implemented through the value add provided by IT and visual solutions ad-hoc utilised.

Is Political Participation Online Effective?

The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (Câmara dos Deputados) conducts an e-democracy initiative that enables people to participate in political decisions regarding legislation. “Portal E-Democracia” is the name of this website in which people can participate in several different ways to speak their minds regarding legislative activities. This chapter analyses the effectiveness of citizens' engagement in the e-democracy initiative through the case study of the discussion of the Internet Civilian Landmark – a bill to regulate Internet use in Brazil. The authors analyse two types of participation: comments to the draft bill and suggestions. To measure the effectiveness of user-participation in such a case of collaborative lawmaking, the authors compare the content of the first draft, the final draft, and the suggestions made through the wikilegis in order to assess whether the discussions maintained within the e-democracy platform were or were not taken into account. This procedure also reveals to what extent online discussion was able to reach political decision-makers and effectively change the Internet's Bill of Rights.

Information Visualization and Policy Modeling

Policy design requires the investigation of various data in several design steps for making the right decisions, validating, or monitoring the political environment. The increasing amount of data is challenging for the stakeholders in this domain. One promising way to access the “big data” is by abstracted visual patterns and pictures, as proposed by information visualization. This chapter introduces the main idea of information visualization in policy modeling. First abstracted steps of policy design are introduced that enable the identification of information visualization in the entire policy life-cycle. Thereafter, the foundations of information visualization are introduced based on an established reference model. The authors aim to amplify the incorporation of information visualization in the entire policy design process. Therefore, the aspects of data and human interaction are introduced, too. The foundation leads to description of a conceptual design for social data visualization, and the aspect of semantics plays an important role.

Semantic Web Standards for Publishing and Integrating Open Data

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the main standardization body for Web standards has set a particular focus on publishing and integrating Open Data. In this chapter, the authors explain various standards from the W3C's Semantic Web activity and the—potential—role they play in the context of Open Data: RDF, as a standard data format for publishing and consuming structured information on the Web; the Linked Data principles for interlinking RDF data published across the Web and leveraging a Web of Data; RDFS and OWL to describe vocabularies used in RDF and for describing mappings between such vocabularies. The authors conclude with a review of current deployments of these standards on the Web, particularly within public Open Data initiatives, and discuss potential risks and challenges.

Fundamental Aspects for E-Government

The upcoming initiatives using ICT in the government process should strengthen the benefit of e-government in most countries. Since e-government among other e-related terms is a widely (interpreted) term, it is sometimes challenging to understand the objective and goals of an initiative. Therefore, in this chapter, the authors introduce and explain most e-government related terms. Even more, they outline some interesting initiatives and implementations to explain the benefits of using ICT in the government domain. Concrete activities are aligned to the terms to explain their practical use in a better way. The authors conclude with several challenges that arise when thinking of the implementation of e-government services. Overall, this chapter should give a good overall view of e-government and the related issues.

A Living Roadmap for Policymaking 2.0

The chapter is based on current research conducted by the authors as part of the “CROSSOVER Project – Bridging Communities for Next Generation Policy Making,” an FP7-funded support action of the European Commission, whose main goal is to reach out to and raise the awareness of users, particularly public government practitioners and policymakers, while developing a research roadmap for establishing the scientific and political basis for long-lasting interest and commitment to next generation policymaking. In particular, the chapter identifies the opportunities and benefits resulting from applications of ICT tools for collaborative governance and policy modeling and provides an outline of what technologies are and will be available to meet the needs of policymakers. The project builds on the CROSSROAD model and roadmap with the aim to reach a stronger focus on policy modeling.

Approaches to Integrate Various Technologies for Policy Modeling

The purpose of this chapter is to outline various aspects of the technical design and architecture of an ICT system that is capable of handling the requirements that are typical for the policy-modeling domain. The authors provide an overview of the relevant technologies for each step of the FUPOL policy modeling lifecycle, the standards that they build upon, and how to integrate them into a coherent system. As FUPOL is currently the only existing system that is capable of covering the full policy modeling process, the authors illustrate the practical application of these architectural and technical concepts with examples taken from the FUPOL system.

Real-Time Multimedia Policy Analysis of Using Video and Audio Recognition from Radio, TV, and User-Generated Content

Real-Time Multimedia Content Analysis opens up exciting possibilities for accessing opinion-oriented arguments about regulations and dynamic policy changes. In this chapter, the authors present common methodologies and core technologies to analyse multimedia content from a practitioner's viewpoint, highlighting their primary impact, best practices, current limitations, and future trends. They illustrate the impact of multimedia content analysis within a governance-oriented applied context based on two use cases: one use case addresses the task regarding the improvement of certain KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the quality of living in a city by performing real-time analytics of TV news in order to assess public opinion and how it changes over time with respect to certain events or incidents; the second use case addresses search and data exploration within multimedia data to reveal certain correlations across space and time in order to retrieve meaningful information from unstructured sources of data, information which can effectively contribute to meeting the concrete needs of citizens.

E-Participation with Stakeholders' Feedback Platforms

Natural language summarization and other social media analytics tools enable a communication manager to rapidly browse through a large number of text documents authored by citizens and get a sense of their interests and opinions. However, this approach is rather passive and unidirectional because it does not allow proposing to the citizen to express their opinions on specific topics. Similarly, social media platforms allow a crowd of individuals to answer questions but not support a “one-to-many” dialogue, where the communication manager, acting on behalf of the public authorities, can interact with the crowd. In this chapter, the authors describe a software platform that aims to address this gap and describe the system envisioned in the FUPOL project.

A Review of the Application of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in the Policy Decision-Making Life Cycle

Fuzzy cognitive maps are a qualitative modeling technique that uses expert knowledge to attempt to represent the interactions between problem-specific factors aiming to simulate how these interactions alter the factors and drive the current state of a problem to a different state. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of research attempts that propose the adoption of Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) as a means to forecast the effect of a policy in a number of interesting domains, including land use, urban (re)development, and other social, political, or economic issues or to simulate the current state of affairs to pinpoint possible hotspots for creating a policy. This chapter presents an overview of these research attempts where fuzzy cognitive maps have been employed as a simulation tool in order to support decision makers in their assessment of the impact of policies and help them adopt the most suitable policy to implement.