Municipal Ear: A Web Service for Involving Citizens in Political Program Work
1. ’ Municipal Ear’ A Web Service for Involving Citizens in Political Program Work Ville Tapio Fountain Park Ltd 15.12.2008 Contents: Presentation of the service (1-10) Presentation of the results (11-17) Theory base (18-22) Company presentation (23-28)
12. Classification of data using SOM “ A self-organizing map (SOM) is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two dimensional), discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map. The map seeks to preserve the topological properties of the input space. This makes SOM useful for visualizing low-dimensional views of high-dimensional data, akin to multidimensional scaling. The model was first described as an artificial neural network by the Finnish professor Teuvo Kohonen.”
13. Main themes People talked most about Work and Education while Social and health services were evaluated as the most important theme. It’s especially important to notice that themes that weren’t much talked about such as Communality, were still evaluated to be very important by all different respondent groups. Importance (avg) Amount (%) Work Education Health services Municipal economy Housing and construction Entrepreneurship Family Administration and policies Services for senior citizens Traffic and transportation Comfort and safety Sports and hobbies Environment Day care Culture Immigrants Communality
14. Subthemes of the communality Immigrants’ intregration to the society Prevention of social exclusion Senior citizens Association activity Family and raising childrens Support networks Schools and youth work
15. Regional variation Immigrants, Traffic and transportation and Environment are evaluated more important in Helsinki than in the rest of the country. Issues related to Entrepreneurship, Services for aging people and Education are considered less important in Helsinki. Work Education Health services Municipal economy Entrepreneurship Family Services for senior citizens Comfort and safety Housing and construction Administration and policies Traffic and transportation Environment Sports and hobbies Day care Culture Immigrants Communality Whole country Helsinki
16. Comparison of respondent groups (for example Males vs. Females) Work Education Health services Municipal economy Entrepreneurship Family Services for senior citizens Coziness and safety Housing and construction Administration and policies Traffic and transportation Environment Sports and hobbies Day care Culture Immigrants Communality Males Females
21. Weak Signals “ A weak signal is a factor for change hardly perceptible at present, but which will constitute a strong trend in the future.” Michelle Codet 1994 “ A weak signal is a sign which is slight in present dimensions but huge in terms of its virtual consequences.” Pierre Masse 1965 Trends Weak signals
22. "Committing to change" (146-160) in Conner Daryl R., Managing at the Speed of Change; How resilient managers succeed and prosper where others fail. John Wiley & Sons 1992, 1998 ISBN 0-471-97494-3 Conner, Darryl R. & Patterson, Robert W. “Building Commitment to Organizational Change.” (18-30) Training and Development Journal 36, 4 (April 1982). Awareness Interest Understanding Acceptance Commitment Internalization Action Requires personal reflection and sharing with others. Result Building Commitment to Change
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Hinweis der Redaktion
The goals of the project were to participate the crowds to the planning of the political program and to raise general interest for municipal politics and for today’s elections.
The idea about the Municipal Ear was born at the summer camp of Kokoomus in 2007. The party was looking for a way to take the successful Ear campaign to the internet, and I was looking for a case study for research project of Fountain Park and universities Oulu and Stanford.
This is the front page of the Municipality Ear. It’s located in domain kuntakorva.fi. It tells why we want you to participate in this, how we will use the data, and that by participating, you can win some movie tickets. We posted link to this for every member of the party whose email address we had. We also placed a Municipal Ear banner for party’s and its local associations’ web sites.
We asked municipal, profession, gender and age to be able to compare the opinions of different groups and to make reports for local associations.
First we will ask you to write your own themes for the political program. Then we will give you a change to evaluate the importance of the themes other participants have written.
This is the page where you can write your own themes. We ask you to write every theme separately, To give a short title for each theme, Describe it a little bit longer, and then click save. When you don’t to write anymore themes, you can move on by clicking the proceed button.
This is basically the same page, but now we ask you to think about someone else’s point of view. For example this time you are asked to write a theme from the unemployed’s point of view. We had about 20 different point of views on this page. Every time you write a new theme, you will get a new randomly chosen point of view.
This is the page where you can evaluate the importance of other peoples themes. Every red box you’ll see on the dartboard is a theme written by someone else. By moving a mouse over the theme, you will see the longer description of it. You drag the theme the closer to the centre, the more important you consider the theme is. And as you can see from the upper right corner, there is more than 200 dartboards of themes to evaluate.
After reading and evaluating other peoples answer, you may have some new thoughts, so we will give you here one more change to write your own themes.
This is the last page of the Municipal Ear. Here you can challenge your friends to participate by entering their email addresses. You friends will then receive and email including a link to the Municipal Ear.
I believe these numbers are higher than anyone anticipated when were planning the project. And the most exciting thing is that we have learned so much about social networks now, that I believe we could double or triple the number of participants in the next project like this.
We classified all the 16000 answers to 17 main themes using software based on theory of SOM. Each one of the cells in this map include many answers which have very similar text content. The cells are the closer to each other, the more they have depended content. For example in the upper left corner there’s many security related cells.
These are the 17 main themes. The blue bars tells how many answers we got related to each theme. The red bar tells the average of the dartboard evaluations of the answers related to each theme. We were especially interested about themes that weren’t talked a lot, but which were considered very important. That is themes with big gaps between the blue and red bars like communality. We believed that those themes have unused potential and novelty value.
Here are few sub themes of the communality. The size of the ball tells how many answers related to theme there is. The vertical axis tells the importance of the theme. The horizontal axis tells the disagreement of the importance of the theme. So you can see from this picture that most people agree that it’s important to try to prevent social exclusion, but not as many consider it important to integrate the immigrants to the society.
There was a lot of regional variation in the results. For example here’s the comparison between Helsinki and the whole country.
And here’s a comparison between the genders.
We also got some visibility in the media. Here’s an article written by the biggest news magazine in Finland. And below the article is a screenshot from the Google showing that more than 400 web pages have mentioned or linked to the Municipal Ear.
By designing a quantitative questions to ask about complex phenomenon (like political opinions), you will only get information you are able to ask, and information which is very hard to use in future oriented planning work. By asking open-ended, non-directive questions, you’ll get information expressing the real thoughts of the respondents, but you are in a trouble, if you’ll get 16000 answers like we did. That is almost 4000 pages of paper if we would print it.
The father of strategic planning Igor Ansoff has defined some filters preventing us from observing new thing from our operating environment. We passed the first filter by participating large amount of people to the planning. We were trying to open the second filter by asking you to think also from other peoples point of view and by allowing you to read other peoples thoughts. And finally we are trying to minimize the effect of the power filter by acting anonymously.
A weak signal is a phenomenon that is typically hard to detect and describe in its early phase. But it may get a clearer structure and develop to a strong trend in the future. We saw communality as a typical example of weak signal in its late phase that is passing or passed already the threshold of mainstream awareness. A few people were able to describe thoughts related to it, but there was already many people who saw those thoughts very important. That’s why we wanted to understand more about communality and decided to analyze it more closely.
Projects like this are not only about research. By participating people to the planning, you will get them interested, help them understand and accept new things and maybe even increase their commitment level or motivate them to act for you.