Alessandro Plaisant and Mario Marcello Verona on "Ideas for a better place: e-participation tools supporting decision making process at the local level"

1. Ideas for a better place:
Alessandro Plaisant Mario Marcello Verona
e-participation tools
SUPPORTING
decision making process
at
the local level
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture - University of Cagliari
10-12 May 2012

2. Increasing number of administrations tries to promote
interaction processes at all levels of government
Work in progress on a series of methods and tools to
encourage participation and pursuing consensus – identify
consistent policy choices for PA
Task:
- test the usefulness and opportunities coming from a mix
of e-participation and “proactive” decision support tools and
- propose an interactive and participatory policy-making
process.

3. New paradigm of participation: from Crowdsourcing to Open Gov
From mass media of passive use, internet has become a place of
production of content: people focuses on interaction and active production
of content, including co-production (Shirky, 2008)
The so-called crowd-sourcing: participation of crowds to the
achievement of common goals through internet.
Within this paradigm:
The model of Open Gov introduced by Obama (2009) in US.
Dual pupose to use internet:
1. To allow transparency (access – analyse – monitor data relating to the
work of PA);
2. To foster participation in public life
Activate the “collective intelligence” capable of identifying problems and
solutions in complex choices

4. a number of e-participation tools (for our purpose 2 families)
1. Tools involved on the conventional aspects of a PA
- Fixmystreet (MySociety, UK);
2. Tools acting on the strategic processes, on the stage of PM
- Ideastorm, UserVoice, Ideascale (ideas platforms);
- Change by Us NYC – who is listening?
- Comment Neelie (consultative instrument for co-drafting and
suggesting changes)

5. The case study of "Ideario per Cagliari”
Starting point:
the successful experience of the “ideario per Cagliari”, a crowd-
sourcing tool that collected more than 500 ideas in few months for the
strategic development of the city of Cagliari
Premise:
In Spring 2011 Italian Majoral elections showed an unusual mass
participation.
Citizens of Naples, Milan and Cagliari chose candidates representing
discontinuities.
“Ideario per Cagliari” was born in the aftermath of the election of Massimo
Zedda as the new Major of the city and the very strong participation of
citizens that followed.

6. http://oratoccaanoi.ideascale.com
(“Now it’s up to us”)

7. June 2011 IDEAS REGISTERED FB COMMENTS
USERS “likes” / VOTES
36 hours 50 150 320
later
1° month 400 1.000
(8% pop)
today 575 1.200 > 1.500 > 3.000
13.000
Enormous amount of ill-defined info, ideas, suggestions
How do we represent knowledge?

8. DS tool for representing and analyse knowledge and highlighting key issues:
cognitive mapping and Decision Explorer - Sustainable mobility and public
transport

9. Cluster Analysis

10. Central Analysis Domain Analysis

11. “Urban farming” (main topic: “environment”; 23 comments; rel. ranking: 183)

12. Conclusions
E-participation is extremely useful since it provides an
administration with a simple, immediate and free use of a pool
of ideas and proposals previously unimaginable
On the other hand, a tool for the structuration of the strategic
process in basic elements, goals and actions, is potentially useful
for better organizational planning: representation of ideas,
clustering in strategic options, and generation of sets of
requirements on specific themes
They may act as input for further discussion (focus group) and
successful implementation of community development
projects
The outcome of the process can be translated into acts and
formal agreements, involving institutions and citizens.