BouchardEtAl_Deliberation - Large Scale Idea Management and ...

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Deliberation in Policy Design:

The FUPOL Project

Guillaume Bouchard, William Darling
,
Stephane

Clinchant
, and Arturo Mondragon

Xerox Research Centre Europe

6,
chemin

de
Maupertuis
, 38240
Meylan
, France

{firstname.lastname@xrce.xerox.com}

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Outline

•
Problem / Challenge

•
Introduction to FUPOL

•
Online Political Deliberation

•
Opportunities and Problems

•
Citizen Voices in FUPOL

•
Hot Topic Sensing

•
Feedback Community Platform

•
Example Use Case

•
Conclusions

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Problem / Challenge

•
Democracy depends on rich political debate, with
input from all sorts of citizens

•
Currently, debate is often restricted because

•
Few citizens attend political meetings

•
Different groups don’t speak with each other

•
Policy makers can’t find/access citizens’ opinions

•
Policy makers
want

to hear from their citizens

•
Ex:
Consultation
sur

l’avenir

du
Parc

Olympique

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Examples of Online Political
Opinions and Debate

Parc

Olympique

Kchang

16
oct.

2011, 11:14 AM


I live in this area and jog around the Olympic
stadium several times a week […] the best
thing that could happen with the Olympic
stadium is to open it up to commerce

B
Théroux

17
oct.

2011, 12:24
P
M


I perfectly agree with your post. Why
people go to St
-
Denis Street, St
-
Laurent or
the
Complexe

Desjardins?
Complexe

Desjardins was a creepy place
twenty
years
ago. Nobody was going there for
lunch […]

Twitter:
wind turbines

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Introduction to FUPOL

•
FUPOL is an EC
-
funded large scale
research project

•
A
imed at developing novel governance
models to engage stakeholders in
decision making / policy creation

•
FUPOL = the Future of Policy creation

•
Main goal is to enable citizens to
participate in public political debate

•
We will automatically collect, analyze,
and interpret opinions expressed on a
large scale from the Internet

Scenarios, Simulation

Stakeholder

Involvement


„Hot
“ Topic
sensing




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Online Political Deliberation

•
It is very common today for citizens to
express their political opinions online

•
Users discuss policies, suggest ideas,
complain about (and sometimes praise)
problems or political decisions taken in
their city
–

all online

•
These valuable opinions are shared
disparately throughout the Internet on
blogs, political forums, Facebook, Twitter,
and elsewhere

•
Bringing it all together into a coherent
whole is the challenge

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Opportunities and Problems

•
The vast amount of citizen opinion that exists
online could lead to a revolution in participatory
politics

•
Democracy as it should work

•
There are several issues to work out

•
O
pinions are spread out on multiple websites
and social networks
–

how do we find them?

•
How do we discover “hot” discussion topics?

•
How do we encourage citizens who don’t
currently participate to start doing so?

•
How do we separate the ideas from the noise?


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Citizen Voices in FUPOL

•
How do we solve some of these problems?

•
Text analysis

•
We are interested in allowing policy makers
to easily find and understand what citizens
are saying, and to equally as easily get
back to them to solicit more feedback

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Hot Topic Sensing (HTS)

•
The HTS module seeks out “hot topics” of
interest to policy makers on the Internet

•
E
xamines disparate sources such as
newspaper forums, political blogs,
Facebook discussions and Twitter posts
to find relevant discussion and what is
“hot”

0
10
20
30
40
50
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Land Use
Hot topic

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Feedback Community
Platform (FCP)

•
The FCP acts as an Idea Management System
(IMS) with two purposes:

•
Policy makers can efficiently analyze citizens’
opinions to help guide policy decisions

•
Citizens can answer questions, express opinions,
and point policy makers towards perceived
problems

•
One of the principal differences between the FCP
and a traditional IMS is the text analysis features

•
Automatic categorization of discovered ideas

•
Automatic summarization of citizen discussions

•
Sentiment analysis of citizens’ opinions

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Example Use Case

•
The United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) proposed a set of administrative
regulations to govern the marketing of organic
labeled products

•
Led to more than 20,000 citizen comments
(mostly against)

•
Problem!

•
Reading through, categorizing, and distilling this
huge amount of data represents a huge
investment in time for busy law
-
makers

•
Automatic summarization is our goal

•
This is a proposed summary that we envision…

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FOR

(~
3

%
)
:

General

(~

100

%
)

-

The

standards,

in

general,

appear

to

be

well

thought

out
.

-

Having

a

strictly

defined

definition

of

the

term

"Organic"

when

used

on

food

labeling

is,

in

my

opinion,

a

very

good

idea
.

-

I

am

very

much

in

favor

of

the

assurance

such

a

standard

would

give

to

the

consumer
.


AGAINST

(~
97

%
)
:

General

(~
30

%
)

-

It

goes

against

everything

that

the

"organic"

label

stands

for
.

-

The

national

organic

foods

act

is

too

weak
.

-

The

American

consumer

should

be

able

to

depend

on

the

label

"organic"

meaning

natural

from

start

to

finish
.

Genetic

engineering

/

Irradiation

(~
60

%
)

-

Any

Federal

definition

of

"organic"

must

preclude

use

of

radiation

in

processing,

sludge

as

fertilizer,

animal

by
-
products

as

feed

and

genetic

engineering
.

-

Under

NO

circumstance

do

I

want

to

have

genetically

engineered

livestock

or

irradiated

products

considered

acceptable

for

the

"organic"

foods

labeling
.

-

Labelling

foods

that

have

been

irradiated

or

genetically

engineered

as

ORGANIC

is

MISLEADING

to

the

public!

Animal

Treatment

(~
5

%
)

-

Living

conditions

for

livestock

should

also

be

addressed

in

any

proposal

that

is

made

to

deem

foods

"organic"
.

-

I

also

think

that

livestock

feed

should

be

regulated

to

prevent

the

livestock

from

being

fed

"recycled"

animal

by
-
products
.

Other

(~
5

%
)

-

I

urge

you

to

extend

the

time

allowed

for

public

feedback
.

-

If

the

proposed

National

Organic

Standard

passes

in

its

current

form,

I

feel

that

I

would

not

know

what

I

am

buying,

nor

be

able

to

trust

in

its

safety
.

Example Report

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Conclusions

•
We have presented the FUPOL project

•
Our approach involves text analysis technologies to
automatically find important topics being discussed
throughout the Internet and present them to
lawmakers in an easily digestible form

•
HTS finds hot topics on the Internet

•
FCP collates citizens’ opinions on these topics and
presents them efficiently to law makers

•
Future
r
esearch
d
irections

•
Finding relevant citizen opinion wherever it may lie

•
Automatically understanding the nuanced opinion to
properly be able to present it to law makers