Expressing and visualising opinions on policies.

Type of content: Assets
Type of asset:
Use case
Tool
Data source
Big data potential
Yes
Policy domains: Institutional Questions / Internal Affairs
Phase in the policy cycle:
Agenda Setting
Open license availability
No
Ease of use
High
Tags: E-Governance Real time information
Addresses:
SWOT Analysis for
Opinion Space
Helpful Harmful
Internal
Strengths• Social media technology designed to help communities generate and exchange ideas about important issues and policies.
• A version of Opinion Space is being used by the U.S. State Department, where it has attracted thousands of participants from around the world to organize, visualize, and analyze constructive suggestions on foreign policy.
• Is a self-organizing system that uses an intuitive graphical "map" that displays patterns, trends, and insights as they emerge and employs the wisdom of crowds to identify and highlight the most insightful ideas.
• The system uses a game model that incorporates techniques from deliberative polling, collaborative filtering, and multidimensional visualization.
• Provides participants dynamic visual feedback about their position on key social issues, relative to other participants.
• Increasing participant engagement in decision-making processes
• The platform applies statistical models and collaborative filtering to rapidly discover emerging trends as data is collected.
Weaknesses• Excludes some populations, like the elderly or lower class, from participating in the process, since they are not using social media networks (or using them to a lesser extent or for different purposes).
• Need for intermittent connectivity
External
Opportunities• By fostering open-ended dialogue and facilitating a more nuanced assessment of public opinion about complex issues, it enables more informed organizational decisions while increasing participant engagement in decision-making processes.
• The platform has been used to assess government performance in California and Mexico, to crowdsource insights on the effectiveness of family planning trainings in Uganda, to gather ideas on how to improve typhoon preparedness in the Philippines.
Threats• Government can use information gathered for its own benefit. Through collection of data, patterns can be predicted and used to government’s advantage
• Excludes some populations, like the elderly or lower class, from participating in the process, since they are not using social media networks (or using them to a lesser extent or for different purposes).
• Need for intermittent connectivity

Open data - Download the Knowledge base

You are free to download the data of this Knowledge base.

To do this you must be an authenticated user: log in or sign in now.

All the data are licensed as Creative Common CC-BY 4.0.