ICT for governance community

Description:

It is now recognised that on-line collaborations have the potential to trigger and shape significant changes in the way future societies will function. Extrapolation of the present exponential growth leads to scenarios where very large percentages of populations could, if equipped with the right tools, simultaneously voice opinions and views on major and minor societal challenges, and thereby herald the transition to a different form of dynamically participative "eSociety". While such scenarios are readily imaginable, it must be recognised that we currently do not have appropriate governance models, process flows, or analytical tools with which to properly understand, interpret, visualise and harness the forces that can be unleashed.

By 2020 there could be no barriers any more for citizens and businesses to participate in decision making at all levels. Advanced tools – possibly building on gaming and virtual reality technologies will enable citizens to track most decision making processes and see how their contributions have been (or are being) taken into account. Current linguistic and cultural barriers will have been largely overcome through use of semantic-based cooperation platforms. Opinion mining, visualisation and modelling into virtual reality-based outcomes and scenarios will help to both shape, guide and form public opinion. The processes and tools will have to demonstrate transparency and trust and be devoid of manipulation. The outcomes of such consultative processes should be faster and more efficient in terms of revising policy and making decisions.

Expectations and Objectives:
To steer discussions on the following research topics:

• Governance and Participation Toolbox
  Definition:
  Advanced tools embodying structural, organisational and new governance models to empower and engage all types of societal groups and communities, enable them to exploit mass cooperation platforms and allow governments to incorporate their input. Based on semantic co-operation platforms, these tools can enable the creation, learning, sharing and tracking of group knowledge that cuts across language and cultural interpretation. They also facilitate transparency and tracking of inputs to the policy making process. The discussion covers technological aspects of these tools, implementation and appropriate governance models where these are used. Security, identity and access control issues are being taken into account, as well as, where appropriate, the delineation of constituency domains according to the specific needs of government applications.
• Policy Modelling, Simulation and Visualisation
  Definition:
  Real-time opinion visualisation and simulation solutions based on modelling, simulation, visualisation and mixed reality technologies, data and opinion mining, filtering and aggregation. This encompasses novel instruments which allow consideration of options based on the simulated behaviour and wishes of individuals, groups or society as a whole to understand the possible outcomes of government proposals, decisions and legislation. The focus of the discussion is on advanced tools and technologies to perform large-scale societal simulations integrating all possible variables, parameters, interferences, scenarios necessary to forecast potential outcomes and impacts of proposed policy measures. The discussion also covers the possibility of employing systems dynamics methodology to analyse and model complex systems, cooperative vs. competitive systems, and also the use of "cloud" computing applications in order to pool web-wide computing resources for large scale data analysis and storage. Another discussion topic is the possibility - or the need - to exploit the vast reserves of Europe's public sector collective data and knowledge resources which are also developing dynamically. These encompass data originated from individuals as well as data aggregated for various purposes, and which are generated from all societal actors but which are legitimately owned by or available to government. Underlying functions to be discussed include translation, process modelling, data mining, pattern recognition and visualisation as well as other gaming-based simulation, forecasting and back-casting as well as goal-based optimisation techniques.