Here is a list of research projects that highlight the various dimensions of policy informatics. To have your project listed on this page, please send an email to Kevin Desouza (kev [dot] Desouza [at] gmail [dot] com) with the title, names and affiliations of researchers, abstract (max 250 words), funding sources, and website (if any).
Leveraging Open Data for Tackling Complex Urban Problems
Kevin C. Desouza (Metropolitan Institute, Virginia Tech) and Akshay Bhagwatwar (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University)
Tackling complex urban problems requires us to examine and leverage diverse sources of information. Today, cities of all kinds and sizes, capture a large amount of information in real-time. Data is captured on transportation patterns, citizen use of government services (e.g. parking meters), and even events such as weather, electricity and water consumption, among others. This data is often buried in individual systems, departments and units, and is seldom used beyond their simple transactional orientation. In this paper, we describe how open data initiatives are making it possible for us to tackle urban problems. Open data initiatives across a range of government agencies have put vital information in the hands of citizens. Citizens in turn have responded by building applications that exploit this information to solve their local urban problems. Citizens are also taking it upon themselves to build platforms where they can share information regarding government services. Information that was previously unavailable is now being used to gauge quality of services, choose services, and even report illegal behaviors (e.g. requesting bribes). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the range of information-based applications being constructed by citizens to solve urban issues and their ensuing impacts on decision-making, problem solving, and urban governance. We also look at the recent trend of prize-based open data application development competitions that motivate application developers to solve urban issues, which are of concern to city administrators and government officials.
Application of Complexity and Policy Informatics to Public Administration to Change the Questions we ask and the Solutions we Discover
Erik W. Johnston (School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University), Kevin C. Desouza (Metropolitan Institute, Virginia Tech), and Qian Hu (College of Health & Public Affairs, University of Central Florida)
We argue for introducing complexity theory to public administration because it allows us to exploit new connections, to raise new questions, and to explore innovative approaches to governance and management. To support more regular, effective, and defensible use of complexity as a contribution to policy-making, public administration scholars must continue to build supporting evidence. In this paper, first, we reflect on why existing analysis frameworks create structural blind spots for understanding governance practice. Second, using examples from our own research and professional experience we demonstrate that a complexity approach allows new questions to be asked that directly connect to policy problems and facilitate decision making in a cost effective manner. Third, we explore a number of factors including practical strategies and ethical concerns that may encourage or preclude the use of a complexity framework and method in policy settings. And finally, this paper calls on public administration scholars to be thoughtfully aware of and ethically responsible for the consequences of the use of complexity methods in research and practice.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0345945 Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC).
Evolutionary Perspective on Collective Decision Making
Hiroki Sayama (Departments of Bioengineering & Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, Binghamton University, State University of New York) and Team
Collective decision making plays an increasingly important role everywhere in today’s human society. In this project, we have been developing novel conceptual/computational multi-level models of the dynamics of complex collective decision making by uniquely shifting the viewpoint from the dynamics of participants to the dynamics of ideas being discussed. We propose to redefine collective decision making as evolution of ecologies of ideas over a social network habitat, where populations of potential solutions evolve via continual applications of evolutionary operators such as reproduction, recombination, mutation, selection, and migration of solutions, each conducted by participating humans. We study the effects of various model assumptions on collective decision making through computer simulations, and their results are being evaluated through experiments of team decision making on complex collaborative tasks with human subjects. This project will generate a novel perspective on human and social dynamics by introducing evolutionary principles and methodologies into the modeling of their complex behaviors, making a theoretical advancement from a traditional, individually-focused psychological or social science paradigm to a more dynamic, multilevel, evolutionary paradigm for collective social processes. A number of practical implications will be produced, e.g., the effects of coherence of shared information and organizational structure within teams upon their exploratory and adaptive performances, which will be widely applicable to current issues that many human organizations are facing today. For more information, please see [LINK]
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.SES-0826711.
From Data to Knowledge in Climate Science, Adaptation and Policy
Scott Paquette (College of Information Studies, University of Maryland)
Climate variability and change are impacting water availability, food security, public and private infrastructure, fisheries, agriculture and tourism throughout the USA and around the globe. The changes in the earth’s climate have implications for transportation, marine shipping, safety, health and Native subsistence foods. While the scientific and technical aspects of climate science continue to advance, application and use of this information by decision-makers in the public and private spheres requires application and regionally specific interpretation. In regional centers around the U.S.A, NOAA funded Regional Integrated Science Assessment (RISA) programs serve as boundary organizations, bridging the communication and cultural gap between climate scientists and decision-makers. There is growing recognition of the need for assessing user information needs and communicating climate science in ways that are tailored to specific stakeholder application. In this research we explore knowledge exchange between scientists and stakeholders in the co-production of knowledge for response to climate impacts specifically in Alaska, Specifically, we explore the scientists’ perception of stakeholder knowledge and the implications for science communication.Results underscore the importance of research partnerships with stakeholders and for unique skills in science translation from data to information and knowledge that can be applied in decision-making.
Information Systems and the Public Sector: Opening up the Black-Box
Akshay Bhagwatwar (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University), Kevin C. Desouza (Metropolitan Institute, Virginia Tech) and Sandeep Purao (College of Information Science and Technology, Penn State University)
The track record of public sector information systems (IS) projects – system acquisitions, design and deployment – has been sub-par. We contend that one possible reason is their dual personality. They are both (a) public sector projects and (b) IS projects. Contemporary research on public sector IS projects often emphasizes the former but not the latter. For example, studies of public sector IS projects may concern themselves with public administration issues, often relegating technology to a black-box. On the other hand, research in the Information Systems discipline offers several conceptualizations – such as tool, proxy, ensemble, computational and nominal – to investigate the IT artifact. In this paper, we use these conceptualizations to analyze contemporary research about public sector IS projects as reported in major public administration journals. Our analysis reveals several crucial gaps. In many cases, we find that technology-focused conceptualizations of the IT artifact are ignored during the investigation. When researchers do use such conceptualizations, they appear to do so fortuitously. Together, these findings point to a opportunities for cultivating a more sophisticated understanding of IT artifacts in public sector IS projects, and converting this to practices for reducing failures in these projects.
Investigating Failures in Large-Scale Public Sector Projects With Sentiment Analysis
Sandeep Purao (College of Information Science and Technology, Penn State University), Kevin C. Desouza (Metropolitan Institute, Virginia Tech), and Jonathan Becker (College of Information Science and Technology, Penn State University)
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) modernization project has been the poster child for academics and practitioners intent on showing the many things that can go wrong with large information technology (IT) implementation projects. The project has already spanned a decade and consumed more than 3 billion dollars. Research has convincingly shown that public-sector megaprojects (those with outlays of over $1 billion US) have a sub-par track record when compared with their private-sector counterparts. Our focus is to demonstrate (a) how stakeholder perspectives may be extracted from documents that a public sector project is likely to generate through its lifecycle, and (b) how these perspectives and differences among them may provide important indicators of project progress. Our research views stakeholders not only as actors who can propel or obstruct the project but also as human sensors who are likely to display a more nuanced and situated understanding of the project. We posit that it may be possible to track changes in stakeholder perspectives, by examining publicly available documents, and investigate how differences among and changes in these perspectives may be used as early indicators of project progress. Our work takes the first steps in this direction by outlining a technique to ascertain attitudes and sentiments of stakeholders. We demonstrate how these measures may be constructed, and speculate about how they may provide potential clues to project progress as well as impending failures in large-scale, public-sector projects..
