Using Geocoding and Topic Extraction to Make Sense of Comments on Social Network Pages of Local Government Agencies

Part 4: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics and Automated Decision-MakingInternational audienceSocial networks have become an important channel for exchanging information and communication among citizens. Text mining, crowdsourcing and data visualization are some approaches that allow the information and knowledge extraction from texts in comment formats, exchanged between citizens in social networks. This movement can be indirectly used as a bias for popular participation, gaining prominence in the construction of smart cities. The objective of this work is to present a method that geocodes citizens’ comments made on posts in Social Network Pages of Local Government Agencies, and extracts the most frequent topics present in these comments. In order to validate our method, we implemented a web system that implements the steps of the proposed method, and conducted a case study. The tool, and consequently the steps of the presented method, was evaluated by four software developers, which indicated that the tool was easy to use, new knowledge could be extracted from it, and some interesting improvements were pointed out by them

Digital by Default: The Use of Service Channels by Citizens

Part 5: Smart CitiesInternational audienceThe use of information and communication technologies by governments is increasing, in many cases to establish new channels of interaction with citizens; and digital by default has been presented as a guide for the development of electronic services. This article discusses the possibility of creating new exclusion forms and is based on the analysis of the profile of use of service channels SP156 of the São Paulo City. To do so, it uses databases of service requests, made available through the City’s Open Data Portal, as well as sociodemographic data from the city’s districts. It was verified that there is a statistically significant correlation between the average monthly income level of the districts and the type of channel used by the citizen to make the requests. It is concluded that it is important to provide multiple channels for citizens to interact with governments so as not to lead to further social exclusion

Electronic “Pockets of Effectiveness”: E-governance and Institutional Change in St. Petersburg, Russia

Part 7: EvaluationInternational audienceThe paper explores the patterns and factors of e-governance development in ineffective institutional settings. Although it is assumed that most of e-projects in such countries failed, we argue that in some contexts such initiatives can survive in the hostile environment and achieve relatively positive results, leading to limited institutional changes. We adapt the pockets of effectiveness framework in order to analyze the Our Petersburg portal (St. Petersburg, Russia). Our findings suggest that such electronic “pockets” may emerge as a deliberate policy of the political elite in an attempt to make institutions work properly. The key factors of such projects’ success relate to agency, namely the political patronage and control, policy entrepreneurship, as well as organization autonomy and the power of the initiative