Deliberation in Policy Design: The FUPOL Project

1. Deliberation in Policy Design: The FUPOL Project Guillaume Bouchard, William Darling, StephaneClinchant, and Arturo Mondragon Xerox Research Centre Europe 6, chemin de Maupertuis, 38240 Meylan, France {firstname.lastname@xrce.xerox.com}

2. 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

3. 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 surl’avenir du ParcOlympique

4. Examples of Online Political Opinions and Debate ParcOlympique Twitter: wind turbines Kchang16 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 Théroux17 oct. 2011, 12:24 PM 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 […]

5. Introduction to FUPOL „Hot“ Topic sensing StakeholderInvolvement Scenarios, Simulation • FUPOL is an EC-funded large scale research project • Aimed 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

6. 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

7. 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 • Opinions 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?

8. 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

9. Hot Topic Sensing (HTS) Hot topic • The HTS module seeks out “hot topics” of interest to policy makers on the Internet • Examines disparate sources such as newspaper forums, political blogs, Facebook discussions and Twitter posts to find relevant discussion and what is “hot”

10. 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

11. 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…

12. Example Report 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.

13. 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 research directions • Finding relevant citizen opinion wherever it may lie • Automatically understanding the nuanced opinion to properly be able to present it to law makers