Exploiting Open Data to analyze discussion and controversy in online citizen participation

In this paper we propose a computational approach that applies data mining techniques to analyze the citizen participation recorded in an online digital platform. Differently to previous work, the approach exploits external knowledge extracted from Open Government Data for processing the citizens’ proposals and debates of the platform, enabling to characterize targeted issues and problems, and analyze the levels of discussion, sup-port and controversy raised by the proposals. As a result of our analysis, we derive a number of insights and conclusions of interest and value for both citizens and government stakeholders in decision and policy making tasks. Among others, we show that proposals targeting issues that affect large majorities tend to be supported by citizens and ultimately implemented by the city council, but leave aside other very important issues affecting minority groups. Our study reveals that most controversial, likely relevant, problems do not always receive sufficient attention in e-participation. Moreover, it identifies several types of controversy, related to ideological and socioeconomic factors and political attitude

Citizen Participation and the Rise of Digital Media Platforms in Smart Governance and Smart Cities

Many governments and firms do believe that technology can supplant governance and human responsibility. This belief poses the question of who will really benefit from smart cities. This article explores this fundamental question through the study of digital media platforms. The ultimate goal is to understand the link between e-governance and smart city initiatives in our cases of study by testing whether these projects are explicitly for citizens. This article shows how e-platforms represent the use of information and communication technologies with the aim of encouraging citizen participation in decision-making processes, improving information and service delivery, reinforcing transparency, accountability, as well as credibility. Thirteen digital media platforms are surveyed, mostly in cities across countries. These e-platforms raise implementation challenges for both firms and policy makers, and new research opportunities for scientist to build up new research and to experiment with the aim to make the benefits for citizens wider and the participatory dimension strongerThis work has been supported by Grant CITADEL H2020 Empowering Citizens to Transform European PubLic Administrations. H2020 Framework Program (under GA 726755, running from 1/9/2016 to 1/9/2020) directed by Daniel Diaz-Fuentes, University of Cantabria--This is a pan European project with the innovation Basque firm TECNALIA as general coordinator. This work has has also been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (TIN2016-80630-P

Technological and Human Development of Smart Cities: An Empirical Characterization of EUROCITIES Case Studies

Smart Cities are conceived as strategic models to confront the wicked problems that exist in urban contexts. The research literature, however, reflects a lack of consensus on the elements that make a city smart. While some authors focus on technological aspects, others consider human factors as principal targets of the cities’ initiatives. Aiming to shed light on this discrepancy and understand what makes a city smarter, in this paper, we analyze a large number of real case studies implemented in major European Smart Cities. From our analysis, we first characterize and categorize the cities according to theoretical Smart City models proposed in the literature. Based on the cities\u27 characteristics and categories, we then compare them according to external variables, such as their positions in worldwide Smart City rankings, and their administrative contexts

Analyzing Citizen Participation and Engagement in European Smart Cities

With the advent of smart cities (SCs), governance has been placed at the core of the debate on how to create public value and achieve a high quality of life in urban environments. In particular, given that public value is rooted in democratic theory and new technologies that promote networking spaces have emerged, citizen participation represents one of the principal instruments to make government open and close to the citizenry needs. Participation in urban governance has undergone a great development: from the first postmodernist ideals of countering expert dominance to today’s focus on learning and social innovation, where citizen participation is conceptualized as co-creation and co-production. Despite this development, there is a lack of research to know how this new governance context is taking place in the SC arena. Addressing this situation, in this article, we present an exhaustive survey of the research literature and a deep study of the experience in participative initiatives followed by SCs in Europe. Through an analysis of 149 SC initiatives from 76 European cities, we provide interesting insights about how participatory models have been introduced in the different areas and dimensions of the cities, how citizen engagement is promoted in SC initiatives, and whether the so-called creative SCs are those with a higher number of projects governed in a participatory wayThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (TIN2016-80630-P), and the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport (CAS18/00035

Trends and challenges of e-government chatbots: Advances in exploring open government data and citizen participation content

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00) and the Regional Government of Andalusia (P20_00314 and B-SEJ-556-UGR20). The authors thank all people who participated in the reported studies.In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework composed of a number of e-government, implementation and evaluation-oriented variables, with which we jointly analyze chatbots presented in the research literature and chatbots deployed as public services in Spain at national, regional and local levels. As a result of our holistic analysis, we identify and discuss current trends and challenges in the development and evaluation of chatbots in the public administration sector, such as focusing the use of the conversational agents on the search for government information, documents and services –leaving citizen consultation and collaboration aside–, and conducting preliminary evaluations of prototypes in limited studies, lacking experiments on deployed systems, with metrics beyond effectiveness and usability –e.g., metrics related to the generation of public values. Addressing some of the identified challenges, we build and evaluate two novel chatbots that present advances in the access to open government data and citizen participation content. Moreover, we come up with additional, potential research lines that may be considered in the future for a new generation of e-government chatbots.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00)Regional Government of Andalusia (P20_00314 and B-SEJ-556-UGR20

Engagement en ciudades inteligentes. Diseño de un marco de análisis teórico y aplicado para participación ciudadana.

Engagement can be defined as a psychological state in which an individual focuses all her attention and enjoys the activity she is doing. The literature highlights the importance of improving this in citizen participation by governments and administrations. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature does not offer clues about how engagement in citizen participation can be improved. This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework of citizen engagement for citizen participation in the context of smart cities. To this end, we first provide a definition of engagement, and describe some of its main characteristics. Next, we present a review of the literature on citizen participation tools in smart cities, analyzing if such tools do influence engagement attributes. The main outcomes of the study are the elaboration of a theoretical framework that integrates characteristic attributes of engagement in the field of citizen participation, and the identification of participation tools analyzing whether they can be designed to increase citizen engagement levels.El “engagement” puede definirse como un estado psicológico en el que el individuo centra toda su atención y disfruta de la actividad que está realizando. La literatura resalta la importancia de la búsqueda por parte de gobiernos y administraciones de este estado en el ámbito de la participación ciudadana. Las ciudades inteligentes poseen iniciativas de participación ciudadana. Sin embargo, hasta donde llega nuestro conocimiento, las claves previstas en la literatura sobre cómo puede fomentarse el engagement en participación ciudadana no han sido estudiadas en profundidad. Abordando este hecho, este artículo tiene como objetivo elaborar un marco teórico del engagement del ciudadano en participación ciudadana dentro de las ciudades inteligentes. Para ello, en primer lugar, se ofrece una definición del concepto y se identifican una serie de atributos que lo caracterizan. Además se presenta una revisión de la literatura sobre herramientas de participación en ciudades inteligentes. Posteriormente, se analizan si esas herramientas influyen en atributos del engagement. El resultado del estudio es la elaboración de un marco teórico con aplicaciones prácticas que integra atributos característicos del engagement en el campo de la participación ciudadana, y la identificación de herramientas de participación analizando si pueden ser diseñadas para incrementar los niveles de engagement de los ciudadanos

A Chatbot for Searching and Exploring Open Data: Implementation and Evaluation in E-Government

© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in DG.O2021: The 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, https://doi.org/10.1145/3463677.3463681In this paper, we present a chatbot to access open government data. Differently to similar systems reported in the research literature, the developed chatbot not only allows searching for data collections, but also exploring information within the collections. The exploration is done via complex queries that are easily built by non-expert users through a natural language conversation. Moreover, as another novel, differentiating contribution, we report a conducted user study aimed to evaluate the chatbot according to the achievement of a number of public service values, as well as measuring distinct objective and subjective metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms traditional methods followed in open data portalsThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00) and the Centre of Andalusian Studies (PR137/19). The authors thank to all people who participated in the reported stud

A Conversational Agent for Argument-driven E-participation

© ACM 2022. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in dg.o 2022, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/3543434.3543447The majority of current e-participation tools are based on online web forums where citizens make proposals and provide comments and opinions, forming large conversation threads. Motivated by the huge popularity of instant messaging applications and the impressive, recent advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, in this paper we propose and investigate the use of conversational agents or chatbots as a new form of citizen-to-government communication. Specifically, we present and evaluate a novel chatbot that assists a user on the overwhelming task of exploring the citizen-generated content of Decide Madrid, a forum-based e-participatory budgeting platform. Among other things, the proposed chatbot is capable of automatically extracting, categorizing and summarizing the arguments underlying the citizen proposals and debates in the platform. Through a user study, we show promising results about the potential benefits of the chatbot in terms of several citizen participation, decision making and public value criteria.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00), the Regional Government of Andalusia (P20_00314 and B-SEJ-556-UGR20), and the Centre of Andalusian Studies (PR137/19). The authors thank to all people who participated in the reported study

Spatial variation in educational quality in Colombia based on the phenomena of agglomeration and academic segregation

This study seeks to measure the degree of agglomeration of educational quality in Colombia, based on the nonsocialization of the population that exhibits low educational quality, with the population that exhibits high educational quality, and thus determine how such agglomeration affects the phenomenon of academic segregation. To this end, we perform a spatial analysis of the educational quality in Colombia and of variables that may influence the phenomenon of educational agglomeration. The level of agglomeration in educational quality in Colombia is demonstrated by the calculation of the Moran’s Index, in which a result of 0.62 was obtained. High educational quality is concentrated in the Andean region, while low educational quality is agglomerated in the periphery of the country, in areas such as the Pacific region. A spatial regression model was carried out to measure the dependence of municipalities on their neighbors, and to determine the main socio-economic factors affecting the phenomenon of educational agglomeration in Colombia, finding that living conditions, unsatisfied basic needs and fiscal transparency all have an impact on the educational quality of the municipalities. It is also found that the number of homicides in the municipalities does not seem to have a significant relationship with education

Adressing Chronic Diseases and Healthy Ageing across the Life Cycle (JA-CHRODIS)

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