research-article

Civic CrowdAnalytics: making sense of crowdsourced civic input with big data tools

Authors:

Tanja Aitamurto,

Jorge Saldivar Galli,

Luis SantanaAuthors Info & Claims

AcademicMindtrek '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Academic Mindtrek Conference

Pages 86 - 94

https://doi.org/10.1145/2994310.2994366

Published: 17 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of crowdsourcing on a policymaking process by using a novel data analytics tool called Civic CrowdAnalytics, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods such as concept extraction, word association and sentiment analysis. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we examine the influence of civic input on the city's Comprehensive City Plan update. The findings show that the impact of citizens' voices depends on the volume and the tone of their demands. A higher demand with a stronger tone results in more policy changes. We also found an interesting and unexpected result: the city government in Palo Alto mirrors more or less the online crowd's voice while citizen representatives rather filter than mirror the crowd's will. While NLP methods show promise in making the analysis of the crowdsourced input more efficient, there are several issues. The accuracy rates should be improved. Furthermore, there is still considerable amount of human work in training the algorithm.

References

[1]

Aitamurto, T. 2016. Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide. 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS. Kauai, January 5--8, 2016. IEEE Transactions, pp. 2780--2789.

Digital Library

[2]

Aitamurto, T. and Landemore, H. 2016. Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland. Policy&Internet 7 (2) 174--196.

[3]

Aitamurto, T. and Landemore, H. 2015. Five Design Principles for Crowdsourced Policymaking: Assessing the Case of Crowdsourced Off-Road Traffic law in Finland. Journal of Social Media for Organizations, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1--19.

[4]

Aitamurto, T., Landemore, H., Lee, D. & Goel, A. 2014. Crowdsourced Off-Road Traffic Law Experiment In Finland. Report about idea crowdsourcing and evaluation. Publications of the Committee for the Future, the Parliament of Finland. 1/2014. Helsinki, Finland.

[5]

Brabham, D. 2013. Crowdsourcing. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Digital Library

[6]

Convertino, G., Sándor, Á., & Baez, M. 2013. Idea Spotter and Comment Interpreter: Sensemaking tools for Idea Management Systems. In ACM Communities and Technologies Workshop: Large-Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems Workshop.

[7]

Edwards, M. 2001. Social Policy, Public Policy --- From Problem to Practice. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

[8]

Estlund, D. 2008. Introduction: Epistemic Approaches to Democracy. Episteme, 5, 1--4

[9]

Estellés-Arolas, E., & González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science, 38(2), 189--200.

Digital Library

[10]

Frey, B. S. (1994). Direct democracy: Politico-economic lessons from Swiss experience. American Economics Review, vol. 84, no. 2, pp. 338--342.

[11]

Fung, A. (2015). Putting the public back into governance: the challenges of citizen participation and its future. Public Administration Review, 75(4), 513--522.

[12]

Harding, M., Knowles, B., Davies, N., & Rouncefield, M. 2015, April. HCI, Civic Engagement & Trust. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2833--2842). ACM.

Digital Library

[13]

Holzinger, A. (2013, September). Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery (HCI-KDD): What Is the Benefit of Bringing Those Two Fields to Work Together?. In International Conference on Availability, Reliability, and Security (pp. 319--328). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

[14]

Howe, J. 2008. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. New York, NY: Crown Business.

Digital Library

[15]

Howlett, M., M. Ramesh, and A. Perl. 1995. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

[16]

Kriplean, T., Morgan, J. T., Freelon, D., Borning, A., & Bennett, L. 2011, May. ConsiderIt: Improving structured public deliberation. In CHI'11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1831--1836). ACM.

Digital Library

[17]

Landemore, H. 2013. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, And The Rule of The Many. Princeton University Press.

[18]

Landemore, H. 2014. Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment. Journal of Political Philosophy. 23 (2), 166--191.

[19]

Lourenço, R. P. 2015. An Analysis of Open Government Portals: A Perspective of Transparency for Accountability. Government Information Quarterly, 32(3), 323--332.

[20]

Noveck, B. S. 2015. Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Harvard University Press.

[21]

Peters, G. 1999. American Public Policy: Promise and Performance. Chappaqua, NY. Chatham House/Seven Rivers.

[22]

Prpić, J., Taeihagh, A. and Melton, J. 2015. The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing. Policy & Internet 7 (3) 340--361.

[23]

Pateman, C. (1970). Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge University Press.

[24]

Pateman, C. 2012. Participatory Democracy Revisited. Perspectives on Politics 10 (7), 1--19.

[25]

Soares de Faria. F. C. 2013. The open parliament in the age of the Internet: Can the people now collaborate with legislatures in lawmaking? Câmara dos Deputados, Edições Câmara.

[26]

Smith, G. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge, UK: University Press.

[27]

Strauss, A., and Corbin, J. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[28]

Westerski, A., Iglesias, C. A., & Garcia, J. E. 2012, October. Idea relationship analysis in open innovation crowdsourcing systems. In Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom), 2012 8th International Conference on (pp. 289--296). IEEE.

Digital Library

Cited By

Frappier TBressa NHuron S(2024)Jumping to Conclusions: A Visual Comparative Analysis of Online Debate Platform LayoutsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685377(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685377
Vargas-Murillo ADe La Asuncion Pari-Bedoya IDelgado-Chávez CMenacho Taipe EReyes Cuba CPolo Chavarri L(2024)The Role of ICT in Collaborative Creation of Public Policies: Crowdsourcing Policymaking2024 International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT)10.1109/ICICT60155.2024.10544427(1704-1708)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICICT60155.2024.10544427
Jiang YPang PWong DKan H(2023)Natural Language Processing Adoption in Governments and Future Research Directions: A Systematic ReviewApplied Sciences10.3390/app13221234613:22(12346)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/app132212346
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy
Regular Papers

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, ...
Crowdsourcing systems on the World-Wide Web

The practice of crowdsourcing is transforming the Web and giving rise to a new field.
Crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing: strategic user behavior on taskcn
EC '08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

In this paper, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

AcademicMindtrek '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Academic Mindtrek Conference

October 2016

483 pages

ISBN:9781450343671

DOI:10.1145/2994310

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

AcademicMindtrek'16

AcademicMindtrek'16: Academic Mindtrek Conference 2016

October 17 - 18, 2016

Tampere, Finland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 207 submissions, 53%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
283
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)15
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Frappier TBressa NHuron S(2024)Jumping to Conclusions: A Visual Comparative Analysis of Online Debate Platform LayoutsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685377(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685377
Vargas-Murillo ADe La Asuncion Pari-Bedoya IDelgado-Chávez CMenacho Taipe EReyes Cuba CPolo Chavarri L(2024)The Role of ICT in Collaborative Creation of Public Policies: Crowdsourcing Policymaking2024 International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT)10.1109/ICICT60155.2024.10544427(1704-1708)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICICT60155.2024.10544427
Jiang YPang PWong DKan H(2023)Natural Language Processing Adoption in Governments and Future Research Directions: A Systematic ReviewApplied Sciences10.3390/app13221234613:22(12346)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/app132212346
Romberg JEscher T(2023)Making Sense of Citizens’ Input through Artificial Intelligence: A Review of Methods for Computational Text Analysis to Support the Evaluation of Contributions in Public ParticipationDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36032545:1(1-30)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603254
Navarrete CMacedo MColley RZhang JFerrada NMello MLira RBastos-Filho CGrandi ULang JHidalgo C(2023)Understanding political divisiveness using online participation data from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential electionsNature Human Behaviour10.1038/s41562-023-01755-x8:1(137-148)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01755-x
Méndez GChiluiza KTibau JCedeno-Mieles VMoreno OMurillo MWong-Villacres M(2022)Exploring Open Parliament Initiatives in Ecuador Through TechnologyExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519763(1-8)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491101.3519763
Romberg JEscher T(2022)Automated Topic Categorisation of Citizens’ Contributions: Reducing Manual Labelling Efforts Through Active LearningElectronic Government10.1007/978-3-031-15086-9_24(369-385)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-15086-9_24
Аблязов Т(2021)Междисциплинарный подход как основа стратегического развития территорий в рамках реализации проектов по формированию комфортной среды жизни человекаЭКОНОМИКА и ПРАВО10.37882/2223-2974.2021.05.01(6-11)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.37882/2223-2974.2021.05.01
Feddersen MSantana L(2021)Unpacking the democratic affordances of CrowdLaw concept and practice: ‘It feels like being part of the game’Politics10.1177/026339572097385042:3(340-357)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720973850
Reynante BDow SMahyar N(2021)A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design ThinkingDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/34876072:4(1-22)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3487607
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten