About

Civic Technology and Open Government

According to Wikipedia, “civic technology enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.”

“Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.”

Measures of Democracy and Civic Engagement

How can scientists and technologists contribute to creating and improving the instruments and tools with which we measure democracy and civic engagement?

Budget and Financial Data Analysis

Recent advancements to artificial intelligence can equip: (1) accountants, auditors, analysts, bureaucrats, comptrollers, public officials, legislators, oversight committees, and members of their staffs, and (2) the public, journalists, and government watchdog organizations, to better make sense of and interact with public-sector data.

People will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale, public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data, receiving responses comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, infographics, and tables.

Meetings Analysis

People will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about public-sector meetings, their minutes and transcripts.

Opinion Polling

Artificial intelligence systems, virtual opinion pollsters, can perform structured, semi-structured, and unstructured surveys, questionnaires, and interviews across a number of communication channels.

Virtual opinion pollsters can perform open-ended questions, e.g., follow-up questions which might explore explanations, rationales, justifications, and argumentation of respondents’ previous answers.

In addition to being able to perform predefined lists, or sequences, of questions, virtual opinion pollsters can traverse interactive scripts, larger trees or graphs of questions, with paths branching, or varying, based upon respondents’ answers.

Comment Analysis

In the United States, the federal government publishes tens of thousands of documents each year in the Federal Register, with over 800,000 total documents since 1994. These documents draw millions of submissions and responses from the public.

Public-sector agencies have a legal obligation to consider all relevant submissions and responses including those which would require a change to a proposed rule. To discern relevance, significance, and disposition, human review is presently needed. The capacity for human review often can’t meet the demand for comment analysis.

Artificial intelligence, in particular natural-language processing technologies, can enable, enhance, and expedite governments’ comment analysis.

Decision-support

Important scenarios to consider include, but are not limited to, providing decision-support for people preparing to vote and for users preparing to select a city to relocate to.

Public-sector Websites and Services

Award-winning government websites include those of Mississippi, which provides a dialogue system on its front page, and of Utah, which provides live chat support.

There are opportunities to contribute to the modernization of other government websites and services, e.g., data.gov, performance.gov, and usaspending.gov.

Welcome

The new Civic Technology Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share information, to discuss these topics, to advance the state of the art, and to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.

In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group. Joining is fast, free, and easy to do.

Interested group participants are also invited to consider entering the group’s election processes to serve as Chairs.

Thank you. Please consider forwarding this information to any others interested in these topics.