44 research outputs found
Interview: Peter Parycek and Noella Edelmann on digital democracy best practice, localism, and e-government
Does democracy have a digital future? At a recent conference at Danube University in Krems, Austria, Sean Kippin asked the co-Chairs of the recent digital democracy and e-government conference (CEDEM) – Peter Parycek and Noella Edelmann – whether politicians were capable of making the necessary transition to digital, what the implications were localism, and which countries were managing the digital transition well
Application of Text Analytics in Public Service Co-Creation: Literature Review and Research Framework
The public sector faces several challenges, such as a number of external and
internal demands for change, citizens' dissatisfaction and frustration with
public sector organizations, that need to be addressed. An alternative to the
traditional top-down development of public services is co-creation of public
services. Co-creation promotes collaboration between stakeholders with the aim
to create better public services and achieve public values. At the same time,
data analytics has been fuelled by the availability of immense amounts of
textual data. Whilst both co-creation and TA have been used in the private
sector, we study existing works on the application of Text Analytics (TA)
techniques on text data to support public service co-creation. We
systematically review 75 of the 979 papers that focus directly or indirectly on
the application of TA in the context of public service development. In our
review, we analyze the TA techniques, the public service they support, public
value outcomes, and the co-creation phase they are used in. Our findings
indicate that the TA implementation for co-creation is still in its early
stages and thus still limited. Our research framework promotes the concept and
stimulates the strengthening of the role of Text Analytics techniques to
support public sector organisations and their use of co-creation process. From
policy-makers' and public administration managers' standpoints, our findings
and the proposed research framework can be used as a guideline in developing a
strategy for the designing co-created and user-centred public services
The Policy Cycle: a framework for knowledge management of practitioners' expertise and role in participatory processes
There is extensive literature on stakeholder theory and knowledge management in the private sector, but less on the public sector, particularly in the context of public participation projects. Public participation initiatives are often designed using a case-by-case approach to identify relevant stakeholder groups, the engagement methods, and the tools to be used. In addition, public sector organizations (PSOs) often rely on participation experts and practitioners' professional knowledge to design successful participation projects. Given that public participation is to enable PSOs access to participants' knowledge, knowledge management is a central issue in public participation projects. In this multi-method, qualitative study we focus on the management of experts' and practitioners' knowledge, and we aim to show how their knowledge contributes to participatory processes and projects, and how the policy cycle can be used as a knowledge management framework to collect and structure their knowledge. We used sequential analysis to study the experiences of 84 practitioners from the public sector collected during a series of workshops. Our findings show the need to locate participation initiatives in the context of the government policy cycle, that the policy cycle can be used for knowledge management in public participation projects and to recognize that practitioners represent a key stakeholder group in public participation
Modeling Evolutionary Dynamics of Lurking in Social Networks
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all
large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the
behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by
others in the community without actively contributing back to the production of
social content. The amount and evolution of lurkers may strongly affect an
online social environment, therefore understanding the lurking dynamics and
identifying strategies to curb this trend are relevant problems. In this
regard, we introduce the Lurker Game, i.e., a model for analyzing the
transitions from a lurking to a non-lurking (i.e., active) user role, and vice
versa, in terms of evolutionary game theory. We evaluate the proposed Lurker
Game by arranging agents on complex networks and analyzing the system
evolution, seeking relations between the network topology and the final
equilibrium of the game. Results suggest that the Lurker Game is suitable to
model the lurking dynamics, showing how the adoption of rewarding mechanisms
combined with the modeling of hypothetical heterogeneity of users' interests
may lead users in an online community towards a cooperative behavior.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at CompleNet 201