In this paper, we present an e-Participation Web system for various platforms and mobile phones, based on linked open data, classification and clustering. The system aims at supporting citizen e-Participation in ongoing regional debates by gathering and openly publishing news and opinions from the Web for easy comprehension and commenting. Our study helps us define relevant evaluation criteria for an adequate citizen discussion system in the new context of open government, the Web, and mobile computing. We present the system, O2, and its application citispe@k, as well as its underlying components: ontology structure, classification and clustering. We then conduct a comparison with existing systems and find that our system is a better approach for efficient citizen e-participation when compared to current existing systems.
Part 2: Deliberation and ConsultationInternational audienceCivic hackathon is a participatory event for prototyping of innovative services through collaboration between citizens and engineers towards addressing social issues. Although continuous contributions are needed for improving the prototypes and for applying them to social issues, participants frequently stop contributions after the hackathon due to their day job. To address this problem, we applied our Web system, called GoalShare, which gathers linked open data (LOD) of hierarchical goals to address social issues, to civic hackathons held in the city of Nagoya in Japan. We compared goal structures between two situations. The results showed that goal structures input by team members themselves with enough instruction time were relatively detailed but varied widely among teams, and those input by a single GoalShare user with limited time remained at a simple overview level but had uniform level of detail. A more user-friendly interface usable without instruction is required for real-world situations
Regional governments are looking for ways to address public concerns more efficiently by utilizing eGovernment systems. The complex environment presents problems for situational awareness and cooperation in public spheres. Current solutions are either lacking in structuring the information or do not support collaboration or discovery. We addressed the problem by developing an open innovation process based web platform for gathering public issues, forming public goals, and for structuring concrete subgoals as goal trees to facilitate participation. We use SOCIA ontology to structure goal information as linked open data. We calculate similarity between a pair of goals by utilizing the tree like structured goal relations. We implemented a negotiation user interface on a video conferencing platform to facilitate interorganizational cooperation and conflict resolution. We are arranging workshops and using the system in various hackathon events to evaluate and analyze the system in real life situations and to gather real life data. We provide the implemented system as a free to use tool.Teemu Tossavainen
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