TRANSFORMING GOVERNMENT AGENCIES’ APPROACH TO EPARTICIPATION THROUGH EFFICIENT EXPLOITATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Government agencies are making considerable investments for exploiting the capabilities offered by ICT, and especially the Internet, to increase citizens’ engagement in their decision and policy making processes. However, this first generation of e-participation has been characterised by limited usage of the ‘official’ e-consultation spaces of government agencies by the citizens. The emergence of Web 2.0 social media offers big opportunities for overcoming this problem, and proceeding to a second generation of broader, deeper and more advanced e-participation. This paper presents a methodology for the efficient exploitation of Web 2.0 social media by government agencies in order to broaden and enhance e-participation. It is based on a central platform which enables posting content and deploying micro web applications (‘Policy Gadgets’-Padgets) to multiple popular Web 2.0 social media, and also collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings) in an efficient manner using their application programming interfaces (API). These interactions’ data undergo various levels of processing, such as calculation of useful analytics, opinion mining and simulation modelling, in order to provide effective support to public decision and policy makers. The proposed methodology allows government agencies to adopt advanced and highly effective ‘hybrid’ e-participation approaches

A Multi-Dimensional Approach for Framing Crowdsourcing Archetypes

All different kinds of organizations – business, public, and non-governmental alike – are becoming aware of a soaring complexity in problem solving, decision making and idea development. In a multitude of circumstances, multidisciplinary teams, high-caliber skilled resources and world-class computer suites do not suffice to cope with such a complexity: in fact, a further need concerns the sharing and ‘externalization’ of tacit knowledge already existing in the society. In this direction, participatory tendencies flourishing in the interconnected society in which we live today lead ‘collective intelligence’ to emerge as key ingredient of distributed problem solving systems going well beyond the traditional boundaries of organizations. Resulting outputs can remarkably enrich decision processes and creative processes carried out by indoor experts, allowing organizations to reap benefits in terms of opportunity, time and cost. Taking stock of the mare magnum of promising opportunities to be tapped, of the inherent diversity lying among them, and of the enormous success of some initiative launched hitherto, the thesis aspires to provide a sound basis for the clear comprehension and systematic exploitation of crowdsourcing. After a thorough literature review, the thesis explores new ways for formalizing crowdsourcing models with the aim of distilling a brand-new multi-dimensional framework to categorize various crowdsourcing archetypes. To say it in a nutshell, the proposed framework combines two dimensions (i.e., motivations to participate and organization of external solvers) in order to portray six archetypes. Among the numerous significant elements of novelty brought by this framework, the prominent one is the ‘holistic’ approach that combines both profit and non-profit, trying to put private and public sectors under a common roof in order to examine in a whole corpus the multi-faceted mechanisms for mobilizing and harnessing competence and expertise which are distributed among the crowd. Looking at how the crowd may be turned into value to be internalized by organizations, the thesis examines crowdsourcing practices in the public as well in the private sector. Regarding the former, the investigation leverages the experience into the PADGETS project through action research – drawing on theoretical studies as well as on intensive fieldwork activities – to systematize how crowdsourcing can be fruitfully incorporated into the policy lifecycle. Concerning the private realm, a cohort of real cases in the limelight is examined – having recourse to case study methodology – to formalize different ways through which crowdsourcing becomes a business model game-changer. Finally, the two perspectives (i.e., public and private) are coalesced into an integrated view acting as a backdrop for proposing next-generation governance model massively hinged on crowdsourcing. In fact, drawing on archetypes schematized, the thesis depicts a potential paradigm that government may embrace in the coming future to tap the potential of collective intelligence, thus maximizing the utilization of a resource that today seems certainly underexploited

Multi-Sectoral Uses of Water & Approaches to DSS in Water Management in the NOSTRUM Partner Countries of the Mediterranean

Agriculture contributes an average of about 10% to the GDP of the partner countries of the Mediterranean involved in the project NOSTRUM. On the other hand, industry contributes an average of about 30% in these countries. It is to remark that in almost all countries the weight of industry accounts between 20% and 30% of the national economy, with the exception of Algeria, where this weight is at about 60%, mainly imputable to the great development of oil extraction and energy sector. In the majority of participating countries, agriculture sector is the greatest consumer of water (more than 65% of total water consumption). Although the case from France where agriculture water use is only about 10% of total water consumption and Italy with around 45%, but this may be due to the fact that most countries reporting for their agricultural water consumption do not include the amount of rain-fed to cultivated lands as a part of their agriculture water use. Most agriculture water use is limited to irrigation water from streams/rivers and groundwater. Rain-fed cultivated-lands in France is almost 90% of its total cultivated area. For Croatia, data given in National Report indicate a 0% of water use for agriculture. The average of water use for agriculture for all the basin is of 62.3% but with a great scatter expressed by a high standard deviation (26.8%) that reflects a wide variation range of water use for agriculture among different countries. The average of water use for agriculture is weakly less on northern countries (52.7%) than on southern countries (75.2) but the twice values are still on the range of the average of the all basin and cannot be taken as indication of difference between north and south. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) plans are currently developed and implemented by various countries to organize the multi-sectoral water uses. On the other hand, the need for Decision Support System (DSS) as a tool in developing and implementing Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is in growing demand. In spite of the great potential for the research and the development of DSS, the utilization of DSS in water management is not widely spread in the partner countries. In some countries, DSS was planned and developed at the scale of territorial integrated water management. Integration of DSS application to the existing IWRM systems at the partner countries would assist in satisfying the water related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).Integrated Water Resources Management, Decision Support Systems, Mediterranean Basin

Groundwater research and management: integrating science into management decisions. Proceedings of IWMI-ITP-NIH International Workshop on "Creating Synergy Between Groundwater Research and Management in South and Southeast Asia," Roorkee, India, 8-9 February 2005

Groundwater management / Governance / Groundwater development / Artificial recharge / Water quality / Aquifers / Groundwater irrigation / Water balance / Simulation models / Watershed management / Water harvesting / Decision making / South East Asia / Bangladesh / China / India / Nepal / Pakistan / Syria

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

i-FRAME – Assessing impacts of social policy innovation in the EU: Proposed methodological framework to evaluate socio-economic returns on investment of social policy innovations

This report presents the final proposal for developing a methodological framework to assess the impacts generated by social policy innovations which promote social investment in the EU, in short i-FRAME. This framework has the objective to provide a structured approach that shall serve as a comprehensive framework for conducting analysis of the economic and social returns on investments of social policy innovations. It also aims to act as a guide to gather insights into replicability and transferability of initiatives which promote social investment across the EU. The report outlines the reviewed and improved theoretical and methodological approach developed by the JRC with help from external experts, and validated by testing the operational components proposed on a number of case studies and scenarios of use. After outlining the conceptual and methodological approach underpinning the i-FRAME (V1.0), the report discusses the proposal for building its operational components according to a structured theoretical framework of a dynamic simulation model for social impact assessment (V1.5). The final proposal for i-FRAME (V2.0) and an overview of the operational components for its implementation are then presented discussing the key elements that should be developed to build a comprehensive i-FRAME Web-Platform and simulator for social impact assessment. Conclusions are then offered in terms of implications for policy and directions for future research. These were drawn after consulting experts from different research disciplines, practitioners and representatives of relevant stakeholders and policymakers, and they include .recommendations for further developing the operational components proposed, paving the way towards building the i-FRAME (V3.0) and beyond.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

B-GOOD: Giving Beekeeping Guidance by cOmputatiOnal-assisted Decision making

A key to healthy beekeeping is the Health Status Index (HIS) inspired by EFSA’s Healthy-B toolbox which we will make fully operational, with the active collaboration of beekeepers, by facilitating the coordinated and harmonised flow of data from various sources and by testing and validating each component thoroughly. We envisage a step-by-step expansion of participating apiaries, and will eventually cover all EU biogeographic regions. The key to a sustainable beekeeping is a better understanding of its socio-economics, particularly within local value chains, its relationship with bee health and the human-ecosystem equilibrium of the beekeeping sector and to implement these insights into the data processing and decision making. We will fully integrate socio-economic analyses, identify viable business models tailored to different contexts for European beekeeping and determine the carrying capacity of the landscape. In close cooperation with the EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide bee health and management data platform and affiliated project website will be created to enable sharing of knowledge and learning between scientists and stakeholders within and outside the consortium. We will utilise and further expand the classification of the open source IT-application for digital beekeeping, BEEP, to streamline the flow of data related to beekeeping management, the beehive and its environment (landscape, agricultural practices, weather and climate) from various sources. The dynamic bee health and management data platform will allow us to identify correlative relationships among factors impacting the HSI, assess the risk of emerging pests and predators, and enable beekeepers to develop adaptive management strategies that account for local and EU-wide issues. Reinforcing and establishing, where necessary, new multi-actor networks of collaboration will engender a lasting learning and innovation system to ensure social-ecological resilient and sustainable beekeeping