NOMAD aims to introduce the experience of setting a political agenda in a non-moderated, crowd sourcing way, by providing decision-makers with automated solutions for content search, acquisition, analysis and visualisation, while gathering online information from social media, blogs, news feeds and the web, following upon complex sets of issues.
NOMAD strives for a society where politicians and organisations will be able to test, detect and understand how citizens perceive their own political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web (forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups, wikis), so as to gather useful feedback for immediate re-action.
The NOMAD Consortium includes: the University of the Aegean (coord.), Google, ATC S.A., NCSR'D, FhG IGD, the Greek and Austrian Parliaments, Critical Publics and QUENTES S.A.
Policy Context
NOMAD's vision is to provide decision-makers with fully automated solutions for content search, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena.
Politicians may use the Web2.0 in order to approach civilians in the following ways:
Monitoring & Listening
Use of monitoring tools in order to find references related to the draft policy agendas and any relevant information related to the citizens' needs, proposed solutions, and justifications. There is enough data available on the web that needs to be extracted before it can be used in government and policy modeling scenarios.
Promoting & Sharing
Use the relevant tools in order to 'push' the draft policy agenda into the relevant social media sites and blogs for feedback collection and/or citizens reactions.
Gathering feedback
The analysis and interpretation of opinions, judgments and prejudices found on the net is a core activity for the protection and the promotion of any brand, product and service, people in terms of visibility, reputation, credibility. Policy-makers should borrow this model from marketing (e.g. President Obama is a brand, similarly a policy is a product) to supervise, defend and emphasize their image in order to create a competitive advantage for the future. Thus it is very important, as a political strategy, to create a feedback between information gathered on the net and the definition of the political agenda. In this context, the expectation for the decision-maker is to become more receptive to accepting feedback and input in the policy making cycle.
Collaborating
Finally though the use of social media tools such as Wikis, LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers, politicians can collaborate with the relevant stakeholders (experts) in order to elaborate further and get more specific information related to:
a) Possible solutions for a specific problem,
b) Justification for each solution,
c) Feedback on what people feel about, and how strongly they support each solution etc.
Description of target users and groups
NOMAD targets the following groups:
- Policy makers in any level of administration;
- Politicians, Members of National or European Parliament;
- Non-governmental organisations (NGO's), participating in policy formulation on any subject;
- Citizens;
- Enterprises (from VSE's to SME's to LE's) participating in public policy discussion.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
NOMAD is being realised in four different phases, through a continuous and complementary approach. Each phase is represented by a distinct set of work packages and milestones, which will allow the continuous monitoring of the project's progress and ensure its successful completion.
More analytically, these phases are:
Requirements Phase
This phase is the driving force behind the project and will provide direct input to the subsequent phases. Its main objectives are to investigate, capture and formulate the framework requirements from both end-user and technology perspective.
Research Phase
The research phase will be the heart of the project and will investigate different approaches for providing the NOMAD solution.
Technology Phase
The technology phase will integrate and implement the research accomplishment of the previous phase and validate the objectives of the requirements phase.
Evaluation Phase
In this phase the NOMAD system will be piloted in real life conditions in order to assess its added-value in policy making processes.
Technology solution
A high level description of the communication and data exchange between the NOMAD components is depicted in the dataflow diagram below.
Crawled data from the various Web sources will be stored to the Web 2.0 Content Database in order to serve as the primary input to the components of the system. The components will process the data and either write their output to the Content Database or pass it to the next component for further processing. The metadata information that will be produced will be stored in the Analysed Information Repository.
This repository as well as the Content Database will be the places where the Visual analytics component will take the data from and present it to the end user. Data for each one of the four analysis components will be displayed in order to provide an understandable and clear way to present the output of each component.
Technology choice: Mainly (or only) open standards, Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA), Open source software
Main results, benefits and impacts
It is anticipated that NOMAD project will contribute towards achieving the following impacts and benefits:
- Improve prediction of impacts of policy measures leading to more efficient implementation of government policies and better identification of the benefits and consequences for citizens and businesses.
- Increase engagement of citizens and wider use of ICT tools resulting in higher potential of innovation concerning interaction of citizens with the government.
- Improve transparency of information related to the impact of economic decisions on society; improved capacity to react to the main societal challenges and increased trust of stakeholders and the public at large in governance.
- Strengthen competitive position of European industry (including SMEs) in cooperation platforms, modeling, simulation and visualisation tools as well as increased potential for wider use of those tools beyond EU level.
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not availableLessons learnt
Assumptions and external factors that we will consider to ensure that the expected impact of NOMAD is achieved can be separated in two principal groups:
Technology related
NOMAD is designed based on a certain state of the art regarding technology specific to Multilingual Textual Analysis, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis, Argument Extraction and Summarisation as well as Information Visualisation. Rapid technology advances that will radically change the basic assumptions made are difficult to evolve instantaneously due to the nature of these technologies. However, NOMAD has taken all necessary steps in order to ensure that State of the Art is examined periodically and adjust/extend developments in order to remain within the forefront of technology development. Furthermore, the complementary character of technology partners (academia and industry) is positive in achieving a balance between technological advance and market orientation.
Market related
No medium-term technology development project is immune to changing market conditions: the period from concept to initial market delivery of products, may extend up to four or five years, and it is easy to develop something for an already vanished market need at the end. NOMAD is in a good position to address this risk as:
a) it is based on the current State of the Art regarding the relevant technologies;
b) it addresses a market at an early stage of its lifecycle, when market needs are almost totally uncovered and market segregation has not begun, leaving all strategic options for market participants still possible;
c) it has a well-defined work-programme that incorporates several activities of market monitoring that will ensure that developments remain market-oriented;
d) the consortium consists of complementary industry partners that ensure that several market directions that will be defined during the project can be examined and covered. The combination of the above constitute a strong shield for defending NOMAD from what normally appears to be the most difficult external factor to defend.
Scope: International