Measuring internet activity: a (selective) review of methods and metrics

Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions

Human-Centered Technologies for Inclusive Collection and Analysis of Public-Generated Data

The meteoric rise in the popularity of public engagement platforms such as social media, customer review websites, and public input solicitation efforts strives for establishing an inclusive environment for the public to share their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Many decisions made at a personal, local, or national scale are often fueled by data generated by the public. As such, inclusive collection, analysis, sensemaking, and utilization of pubic-generated data are crucial to support the exercise of successful decision-making processes. However, people often struggle to engage, participate, and share their opinions due to inaccessibility, the rigidity of traditional public engagement methods, and the lack of options to provide opinions while avoiding potential confrontations. Concurrently, data analysts and decision-makers grapple with the challenges of analyzing, sensemaking, and making informed decisions based on public-generated data, which includes high dimensionality, ambiguity present in human language, and a lack of tools and techniques catered to their needs. Novel technological interventions are therefore necessary to enable the public to share their input without barriers and allow decision-makers to capture, forage, peruse, and sublimate public-generated data into concrete and actionable insights. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate how human-centered approaches involve the stakeholders in the design, development, and evaluation of tools and techniques that can lead to inclusive, effective, and efficient approaches to public-generated data collection and analysis to support informed decision-making. To that end, in this dissertation, I first addressed the challenges of empowering the public to share their opinions by exploring two major opinion-sharing avenues --- social media and public consultation. To learn more about people\u27s social media experiences and challenges, I built two technology probes and conducted a qualitative exploratory study with 16 participants. This study is followed up by exploring the challenges of inclusive participation during public consultations such as town halls. Based on a formative study with 66 participants and 20 organizers, I designed and developed CommunityClick to enable reticent share their opinions silently and anonymously during town halls. Equipped with the knowledge and experiences from these works, I designed, developed, and evaluated technologies and methods to facilitate and accelerate informed data-driven decision-making based on increased public-generated data. Based on interviews with 14 analysts and decision-makers in the civic domain, I built a visual analytics system CommunityClick that can facilitate public input analysis by surfacing hidden insights, people\u27s reflections, and priorities. Leveraging the lessons learned during this work, I created a visual text analytics system that supports serendipitous discovery and balanced analysis of textual data to help make informed decisions. In this work, I contribute an understanding of how people collect and analyze public-generated data to fuel their decisions when they have increased exposure to alternative avenues for opinion-sharing. Through a series of human-centered studies, I highlight the challenges that inhibit inclusivity in opinion sharing and shortcomings of existing methods that prevent decision-makers to account for comprehensive public input that includes marginalized or unpopular opinions. To address these challenges, I designed, developed, and evaluated a collection of interactive systems including CommunityClick, CommunityPulse, and Serendyze. Through a rigorous set of evaluation strategies which include creativity sessions, controlled lab studies, in-the-wild deployment, and field experiments, I involved stakeholders to assess the effectiveness and utility of the built systems. Through the empirical evidence from these studies, I demonstrate how alternative designs for social media could enhance people\u27s social media experiences and enable them to make new connections with others to share opinions. In addition, I show how CommunityClick can be utilized to enable reticent attendees during public consultation to share their opinions while avoiding unwanted confrontation and allowing organizers to capture and account for silent feedback. I highlight how CommunityPulse allowed analysts and decision-makers to examine public input from multiple angles for an accelerated analysis and more informed decision-making. Furthermore, I demonstrate how supporting serendipitous discovery and balanced analysis using Serendyze can lead to more informed data-driven decision-making. I conclude the dissertation with a discussion on future avenues to expand this research including the facilitation of multi-user collaborative analysis, integration of multi-modal signals in the analysis of public-generated data, and potential adoption strategies for decision-support systems designed for inclusive collection and analysis of public-generated data

Tweet-Sourcing Caracas: Using E-Participation for Urban Planning In Global South Cities

The purpose of this study is to explore how social media can be used as a data source and to engage citizens in urban planning and governance process. Given the rise of mobile technologies and the extensive use of social media networks in cities in the global south, electronic participation (e-participation) has become a mechanism for constant interaction between residents and government officials and is a method to collect unique information from the public. However, it is still not clear how reliable and accurate social media data can be for urban planning. Through a case study analysis of Sucre Municipality in Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, this research used a social media platform, Twitter, to examine the content collected through the exchange between the public and the Mayor of Sucre over three months. The tweets were examined regarding time, location, theme and content and comparisons were made with official documents and news articles to evaluate accuracy and relevance of the data. People engage more with the Mayor than the institution and the amount of tweets regarding the city overpass political or personal ones. Slum areas use social media as an advocacy platform to rise their concerns regarding water shortage and waste management irregularities. Urban and formal areas use tweets as primary mechanism to communicate crimes and irregularities in the physical state of streets. Two tweet-sourced interactive maps were developed in web mapping platform to visualize the content of the tweets. Recommendations were made to help municipalities and planners to incorporate efficiently and critically social media as a new participatory tool for planning and governance

Evaluating Advanced Forms of Social Media Use in Government

Government agencies gradually start moving from simpler to more advanced forms of social media use, which are characterized by higher technological and political complexity. It is important to evaluate systematically these efforts based on sound theoretical foundations. In this direction this paper outlines and evaluates an advanced form of automated and centrally managed combined use of multiple social media by government agencies for promoting participative public policy making. For this purpose an evaluation framework has been developed, which includes both technological and political evaluation, and focuses on the fundamental complexities and challenges of these advanced forms of social media exploitation. It has been used for the evaluation of a pilot application of this approach for conducting a consultation campaign concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program in Piedmont, Italy, revealing its important potential and strengths, and at the same time some notable problems and weaknesses as well

POLICY PROCESSES SUPPORT THROUGH INTEROPERABILITY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Governments of many countries attempt to increase public participation by exploiting the capabilities and high penetration of the Internet. In this direction they make considerable investments for constructing and operating e-participation websites; however, the use of them has been in general limited and below expectations. For this reason governments, in order to widen e-participation, should investigate the exploitation of the numerous users-driven Web 2.0 social media as well, which seem to be quite successful in attracting huge numbers of users. This paper describes a methodology for the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media by government organizations in the processes of public policies formulation, through a central platform-toolset providing interoperability with many different social media, and enabling posting and retrieving content from them in a systematic centrally managed and machinesupported automated manner (through their application programming interfaces (APIs)). The proposed methodology includes the use of ‘Policy Gadgets’ (Padgets), which are defined as micro web applications presenting policy messages in various popular Web 2.0 social media (e.g. social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) and collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). Interaction data can be used as input in policy simulation models estimating the impact of various policy options. Encouraging have been the conclusions from the analysis of the APIs of 10 highly popular social media, which provide extensive capabilities for publishing content on them (e.g. data, images, video, links, etc.) and also for retrieving relevant user activity and content (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.), though their continuous evolution might pose significant difficulties and challenges

From social networks to emergency operation centers: A semantic visualization approach

Social networks are commonly used by citizens as a communication channel for sharing their messages about a crisis situation and by emergency operation centers as a source of information for improving their situation awareness. However, to utilize this source of information, emergency operators and decision makers have to deal with large and unstructured data, the content, reliability, quality, and relevance of which may vary greatly. In this paper, to address this challenge, we propose a visual analytics solution that filters and visualizes relevant information extracted from Twitter. The tool offers multiple visualizations to provide emergency operators with different points of view for exploring the data in order to gain a better understanding of the situation and take informed courses of action. We analyzed the scope of the problem through an exploratory study in which 20 practitioners answered questions about the integration of social networks in the emergency management process. This study inspired the design of a visualization tool, which was evaluated in a controlled experiment to assess its effectiveness for exploring spatial and temporal data. During the experiment, we asked 12 participants to perform 5 tasks related to data exploration and fill a questionnaire about their experience using the tool. One of the most interesting results obtained from the evaluation concerns the effectiveness of combining several visualization techniques to support different strategies for solving a problem and making decisions.This work was supported by the project PACE grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity [TIN2016-77690-R]

Open budget data: mapping the landscape

This report offers analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency. Issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data are charted in different forms of digital media. The objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it. How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone - determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change. Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens

The Technology, Organization, and Environment Framework for Social Media Analytics in Government: The Cases of South Africa and Germany

This paper investigates factors influencing the adoption of social media analytics (SMA) for citizen relationship management (CzRM). Three real-world cases of government departments, two in South Africa and one in Germany, were investigated, and focus group discussions were conducted. The technological, organizational, and environmental (TOE) theory and qualitative content analysis guided the data analysis. The findings revealed that in all cases, staff usually conducted a manual analysis of social media and SMA had not been implemented sufficiently to realize its full potential. Insights were obtained from TOE and factors were identified that should be considered for improving the planning of SMA adoption in government. Data quality, methods and tools for SMA, and resources (e.g., skills and budget) were the most important factors identified for achieving success in SMA projects in government. The contribution is an improved understanding of the adoption of SMA for CzRM and can lead to effective monitoring of social media posts by citizens to improve service delivery and, hence, lead to more citizen-centric government