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Use of Information and Communication Technologies and Social Media in politics and policy-making: For Better of for worse?

The event ‘Use of ICT and Social Media in politics and policy-making: For better of for worse?’, co-organised by GALLUP Europe, Gallup Institute for Advanced Behavioural Studies (IFABS) and ENoLL, was introduced by Robert Machin, Managing Director of The Gallup Organisation Europe, who introduced the topic and the need for this debat

The event ‘Use of ICT and Social Media in politics and policy-making: For better of for worse?’, co-organised by GALLUP Europe, Gallup Institute for Advanced Behavioural Studies (IFABS) and ENoLL, was introduced by Robert Machin, Managing Director of The Gallup Organisation Europe, who introduced the topic and the need for this debate about the usage of big data and opinion mining for policy making.

 

 

Marietje Schaake, Member of the European Parliament and Member of the Committee for Culture ad Education, opened the keynotes with a video-message especially recorded for the occasion, showing the importance of social media for her as a politician, to engage with civil society, as a source of essential information and as a way to get trust and authenticity. Regarding the usage of big data Mrs. Schaake emphasised the importance of giving information back to the citizens as open data since “Governments should work as a platform for citizens in a transparent way”.

Jarmo Eskelinen, CEO of Forum Virium Helsinki and Vice-President of ENoLL, brought to the scene the case study of The City and the importance of utilising the creativity of communities to design new services and concepts experimenting in real-life settings. He reminded the audience with some examples that creative communities are not new but that indeed the speed of their communication provided by the ICT tools is new.

Linking this with a world that is witnessing a fast migration into cities, reaching 4 billion people living in urban areas in the upcoming years, Mr. Eskelinen stated there is a need to do things smartly enough to survive. City as an organism (not a structure) and city as on-going change (never finished) are the two key features to consider when thinking about future cities according to his view. Ubiquitous services, location (mark, tag, purchase) and being always on are the essential elements of the smart technologies already used by urban citizens as part of their normal daily activities.

Jarmo observed that crowdsourcing, as a tool to find solutions to certain issues and challenges in a distributed and participatory way involving networks and communities of people, finds some success stories in the private sector but this model does not seem to take off in the public sector with many attempts being lost. From his point of view the main problem is that there are not incentives for people to use it since nobody “owns the question and stands behind it” and “the implementation of the ideas is the hardest part”.

“While politicians tackle the wicked problems, communities self-facilitate themselves”, participatory platforms such as “patients like me” (http://www.patientslikeme.com/) are a good example. The harvesting of information from those platforms can provide information not feasible to get any other way and can be used to spot trends. Mr. Eskelinen reiterated the need for more tools for data harvesting, data sharing and business intelligence, and also the need of giving back those tools to the people as open data free to use, reuse and distribute.

See here the intervention by Mr. Jarmo Eskelinen, CEO Forum Virium Helsinki, ENoLL Vice President.

David Ringrose, Head of Communications, Directorate General Information Society and Media, European Commission, explained the usage of social media to support the Digital Agenda where two different brands have been created: @NeelieKroesEU (human face/politician) and @DigitalAgendaEU (portfolio) with an increasing number of internal contributors. According to Mr. Ringrose the information communicated through social media is becoming a legitimate source material.

Platforms used by DG INFSO include blogs that are increasingly used to share positions and to get feedback from stakeholders, Twitter and Facebook and they are exploring new platforms such as crowdsourcing videos for public contributions, Google maps to visualise origin of the contributions and crowdsourcing.

Online platforms also help people joining the Digital Agenda Assembly to interact and start dialogs and have their own debates before the conference starts.

Mr. Ringrose stated that to create impact communications have to be at the heart of the corporate culture, involving as many internal people as possible, which is a big cultural change. The next step from his perspective is to actually measure the impact and effect on organization, people, tools and policy. “With more internal people doing outreach, how can the impact in policy being measured?” He emphasised that the main challenge will be how to deal with the big amount generated as the more feedback is received and the more complicating the management of all that information is. Mr. Ringrose concluded with mentioning that the Digital Agenda is an experiment from that perspective.

Following the keynotes, Alexandra Balahur-Dobrescu (PhD, Post-doctoral Researcher at JRC, EC) moderated an interesting panel and debate composed of:

  • Benedictus Nieuwenhuis, PhD, IT-coordinator, Foreign Policy Instruments Service, European Commission,
  • Stanley Pignal, Brussels correspondent, Financial Times,
  • Hanno Ranck, Head of Communications, European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS),

with a lot of interaction with questions, comments and positions from the audience.

 

The debate was started with a question from Mrs. Balahur-Dobrescu about the appropriateness of the audience targeted and reached through ICT and social media from the European Institutions and it was followed by a list of questions raised both by her and the audience covering aspects such as whether social media makes the policy making process easier or not, how to avoid opinions online to be biased or manipulated and many others. Responses by the panelists and the audience tackled the following aspects:

 

–       The different usages of social media by different entities: “Policy is not politics’ policy-makers use social media to spot trends”. “Many things that cannot happen in the mainstream media, it happens in blogs”.

–        Social media do not replace all the other types of media and they do have an un-equal representation depending on the country and the citizen profile. The usage of local languages is a very important matter.

–       The real identity behind the virtual identity: “There is still a gap in the way conversations are conducted and they should be conducted”, stated Mr. Pignal.

–       The amount of resources needed to keep a constant dialog with the audience (i.e. citizens).

–       The issue of control within the public institutions that many times limits both the usage of social media by them and the real use they make of the feedback or opinions gathered.

–       Social media only as a way to communicate or also as a way to involve citizens in policy making. When the EC asks for opinions, it is not the regular citizen but people interested in those specific questions who answer. ICT & social media can change the way policy-makers engage.

–       EU versus US success in the usage of social media by the public institutions and politicians (with Europe not generating yet enough information or debate).

–       Social media are not the only a way of communication but it is a way to gather information and “ the trend is what matters”. The EC are looking for ways to monitor trends. For policy makers it is more about listening and spot trends captured from big data.

–       Online platforms need some critical mass of real discussions.

 

The final question raised by the moderator asked the panellists to summarise their views mentioning advantages and disadvantages of using ICT and social media for policy making, Mr. Pignal stated that despite of social media being “thin” and the audience reached is mainly young people, interesting conversations are going on. From his perspective there is still a need to talk to people who have credibility. Mr. Nieuwenhuis summarised his views emphasising how social media have changed his way of working, giving him the opportunity to meet many internal and external people and with a believe that this will have an input in the long run.

Mr. Ranck, concluded explaining that for them social media is another channel “to put your opinion out” but “to do it right creates a lot of work”.

The debate and event was followed by a networking lunch where the conversations were carried on in a more informal way.

See all the interventions here.

Report by Ana Garcia (ENoLL), Nicholas Scharioth (Gallup Europe) and Renard Aurelien (Gallup Europe)

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