business case - europa...business case crowdsourcing of policy ideas date: 16/06/2016 doc. version:...

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DIGIT Unit B4

Business Case

Crowdsourcing of policy ideas

Date: 16/06/2016 Doc. Version: 1.00

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Crowdsourcing of policy ideas Business Case

Date: 16/06/2016 2 / 13 Doc. Version: 1.00

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Document Title: Business Case

Project Title: Crowdsourcing of policy ideas

Document Author: Eva Cobos Cortina

Nikolaos Loutas

Project Owner: Angelo Tosetti

Project Manager: Marco Fichera

Doc. Version: 1.00

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Date: 16/06/2016

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Marco Fichera Project Manager Approved 16/06/2016

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 CONTEXT ............................................................................................................................. 4

1.1 Situation Description ....................................................................................................... 4

1.2 Situation Impact ............................................................................................................... 4

2 EXPECTED OUTCOMES ........................................................................................................ 5

3 POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES ..................................................................................................... 6

3.1 Alternative A: No action................................................................................................... 6

3.2 Alternative B: Use existing solutions as-is ....................................................................... 7

3.3 Alternative C: Development of a corporate policy ideas crowdsourcing tool ................. 7

4 SOLUTION DESCRIPTION ..................................................................................................... 9

4.1 Benefits ............................................................................................................................ 9

4.2 Success Criteria ................................................................................................................ 9

4.3 Assumptions and constraints ........................................................................................... 9

4.4 Scope ............................................................................................................................... 9

4.5 Solution Impact .............................................................................................................. 10

4.6 Deliverables ................................................................................................................... 11

4.7 Risks ............................................................................................................................... 11

4.8 Costs, Effort and Funding Source ................................................................................... 11

4.9 Roadmap ........................................................................................................................ 11

4.10 Synergies and Interdependencies .................................................................................. 12

5 GOVERNANCE ................................................................................................................... 12

5.1 Project coordination ...................................................................................................... 12

5.2 Service Provider ............................................................................................................. 12

5.3 Associated services/stakeholders .................................................................................. 12

5.4 Beneficiaries .................................................................................................................. 12

APPENDIX 1: REFERENCES AND RELATED DOCUMENTS .......................................................... 12


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1 CONTEXT

1.1 Situation Description

Public administrations are increasingly relying on open government practices to promote social engagement and help develop a culture of innovation both in the short and long term.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) creates favourable conditions for governments to be more open and for citizens to participate and more actively influence the decisions that will then affect their daily lives. Online tools are available 24/7 and help participants overcome the temporal and geographical restrictions they may face when it comes to actively partcipating to policy making.

Examples of ongoing initiatives include, but are not limited to:

The European Parliament online petition portal1;

PuzzledByPolicy2, a platform co-funded by the European Commission where stakeholders could submit arguments against or for to a specific topic;

Madrid’s City Council Decide Madrid platform3 where stakeholders can submit policy ideas;

Paris’ City Council initiatives IdeeParis4 and BudgetParticipatif5 where stakeholders can submit policy ideas for budget allocation around specific themes;

KommunalForum.de6 initiated privately by municipal staff which enables a simple communication about the municipal administration in Germany.

The European Union has an increased its interest in placing the citizen at the centre of policymakers’ considerations and there have been some notable achievements, such as the European Citizens’ Initiative7 back in 2012 with the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty and more recently, in May 2015 the adoption of the Better Regulation Agenda8.

Despite this, more effort seems necessary. Many initiatives are run as pilots and terminate after the project-phase ends, and thus concepts at the heart of citizens’ engagement such as policy co-creation and co-production are still not embedded in the EU policy-making lifecycle. Agenda-setting power is not systematically shared and it is difficult to take into account policy proposals coming from citizens and stakeholders throughout the policy-making lifecycle.

1.2 Situation Impact

The current situation has a negative impact on public administrations with regard to:

Ensuring that policies respond to individuals’ needs and are relevant to their circumstances.

Public administrations might not always have a clear view on what the stakeholders’ needs are,

due to limited interaction channels.

Collecting stakeholders’ innovative input and feedback. Public administrations might miss

opportunities to take into account relevant input coming from distributed and diverse

population. In fact, these stakeholders might bring positive and innovative contributions to the

development of policy ideas.

1 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/20150201PVL00037/Petitions

2 http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu/en-gb/uDebate.aspx

3 https://decide.madrid.es/proposals

4 https://idee.paris.fr/

5 https://budgetparticipatif.paris.fr/bp/

6 http://www.kommunalforum.de/

7 https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative

8 http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/index_en.htm

http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu/en-gb/uDebate.aspx


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Stakeholders’ engagement. Limitations in the openness of the policy-making lifecycle negatively

impact stakeholders’ engagement.

Re-inventing the wheel. Uncoordinated initiatives increase the risk of duplicating the work done

within and across public administrations.

Outreach. Stakeholders’ participation is not evenly distributed across societal groups and

geographic regions.

Furthermore, the current situation also has a negative impact on stakeholders (citizens and organisations)

at large. They have limited visibility on how decisions are taken, which in turn decreases their trust in the

public administration.

2 EXPECTED OUTCOMES

The expected outcomes derived from the implementation of the proposed solution should aim at fulfilling

the challenges identified in section Error! Reference source not found.. More specifically, public

administrations should be able to:

Reduce the gap between stakeholders’ needs and implemented policies;

Collect innovative ideas which can lead to new policies;

Engage citizens in the policy-making cycle from a very early stage, i.e. at the time of agenda setting;

Re-establish stakeholders’ trust in the public administration.


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3 POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES

This section describes known or potentially available alternative solutions to tackle the described situation. From the list of the potential alternatives, one of them is clearly chosen. The chosen alternative is the one that is the best for this proposed solution and it is detailed in section 4.

For each identified alternative, a general description, a SWOT analysis and a qualitative assessment is provided. The SWOT analysis provides the major Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats as perceived by the stakeholders considering the organisational impact, the financial impact, the timing impact and the associated risks. Three possible alternatives have been considered to tackle the situation and meet the objectives:

Alternative A: Baseline scenario – No action

Alternative B: Use existing solutions as-is

Alternative C: Development of a corporate policy ideas crowdsourcing tool

3.1 Alternative A: No action

In the baseline scenario, policy officers will continue to carry out their work following the current approach. SWOT Analysis

Strengths Weaknesses

No need for investments.

Specific needs of stakeholders remain unmet.

Innovative ideas for new policies do not reach policy makers.

Several online platforms co-exist in EU, with low to none optimisation of interoperability, consistency, and resources’ efficiency.

Opportunities Threats

The European Citizens’ Initiative remains the main stakeholders’ policy ideas crowdsourcing tool of the European Commission.

Lack of engagement from stakeholders; they feel that their voice is not heard.

Lack of trust from stakeholders; they feel the policy-making process does not take into account their needs.

The European Citizens’ Initiative requires a high number of votes for admission to the next stage (one million supports). Stakeholders’ initiatives often fail to reach the required number of signatures.

This alternative does not raise itself as the best option since it will not contribute to the

achievement of the expected outcomes, because opportunities to collect policy ideas will remain

limited, especially at the time of agenda setting.


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3.2 Alternative B: Use existing solutions as-is

A second alternative entails using existing solutions that allow the collection of ideas/petitions from stakeholders. At the European Union level, prominent examples include: the IDEA initiative developed by the European Commission’s DG Informatics (which uses Atlassian9 tools) or the European Parliament’s Petitions portal10 (which uses an in-house developed software).

At the Member States’ level, examples are: the Madrid Decide’s Consul platform11, the Paris’ “Idées”12 and “Budget Participatif”13 platforms, which manage policy ideas crowdsourcing initiatives via ticketing-system-style interfaces with a customised design.

SWOT Analysis


Limited additional investments.

Possibility to rely on a solution that has already been delivered.

In house expertise exists (depending on the selected existing tool).

Existing solutions have their shortcomings in terms of automation, e.g. lack of text mining and clustering capabilities, and multilingualism support.

It is not clear how existing solutions can scale up to support a specific process, more requests and increased demand/use.


Synergies with the Idea initiative of DIGIT or other solutions used by Commission services or Member States.

Allows to tap into the expertise and creativity of society as a whole or internal stakeholders of an organisation as a whole in order to come up with innovative ideas for new services, policies, solutions etc.

Using existing solutions at a larger scale would raise questions related to service governance and ownership.

Policy ideas that finally do not materialise can impact stakeholders’ interest, engagement and trust in the process.

This alternative can help public administrations in improving the current situation with a relatively

low investment. However, looking in the long term, it does not raise itself as the best option since

existing solutions are not always designed with advanced functionalities to manage scalability.

Hence, adaptations and further development will be required in order to ensure that existing

solutions can meet the growing demand. This takes us to the next alternative.

3.3 Alternative C: Development of a corporate policy ideas crowdsourcing tool

A third alternative entails the development of a corporate solution.

The solution would take the form of a platform that allows public administrations to cope with a greater demand compared to existing platforms and several languages.

9 https://www.atlassian.com/

10 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/20150201PVL00037/Petitions

11 https://github.com/consul/consul

12 https://idee.paris.fr

13 https://budgetparticipatif.paris.fr/bp/

https://www.atlassian.com/


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SWOT Analysis


The expected outcomes can be achieved.

Feedback collection in a structured and consolidated process.

Transparency in the way feedback is processed.

Ideas enrichment via: comment, vote, rate, sentiment indication, and contribution type indication.

Stakeholders have the opportunity to be informed via a notification system.

Multilingual support in at least the 3 most spoken languages in EU-28.

Advanced reporting and analysis capabilities:

- text mining: keywords, trends, organisations, country, profiles;

- numerical statistics on non-free text fields.

Additional investments in technology, process definition and implementation.


Can be built on existing solutions.

Allows to tap into the expertise and creativity of society as a whole or the internal stakeholders of an organisation as a whole in order to come up with innovative ideas for new services, policies, solutions etc.

Policy ideas that finally do not materialise can impact the stakeholders’ interest, engagement and trust in the process.

There has to be caution not to reinvent the wheel.

This alternative is the selected solution as it can help public administrations to achieve the expected outcomes. More specifically, this solution will be developed through an interactive and collaborative ticketing system platform. A policy idea will be a ticket submitted by a registered user. The collaborative engine of the platform will allow users to comment, rate, vote, indicate the sentiment and the contribution type (from a closed list, e.g. for, against, enrichment, question). The platform will allow administrator users to manage tickets and indicate the current status of the ticket from a closed list of values. Users will be able to propose new policy ideas to the system by adding a new ticket. Each ticket will follow the acceptance process defined by the European Commission, transparently described on the platform. A list of tags will be available to categorise each ticket, which will allow admin users to easily cluster the policy ideas based on tickets’ similarities. A text analytics plug-in will be implemented on the tickets repository in order to extract the submitted policy ideas keywords, perform advanced semantic analysis and detect duplications of contributions. This alternative can easily be put in place with open-source solutions. It will entail building a ticketing system (e.g. OTRS Free, Best Practical’s Request Tracker) integrated with an open source text analytics tool (e.g. GATE, KNIME). The text analytics tool could be an integral part of the ticketing system, or alternatively developed as a separate system.


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4 SOLUTION DESCRIPTION

4.1 Benefits

The main benefits of the proposed solution for policy ideas crowdsourcing are indicated below.

For public administrations:

Ability to collect ideas for policy-making purposes from vast and diverse audience, ensuring that stakeholders’ needs are taken into account;

Ability to engage stakeholders in the policy-making cycle from a very early stage, i.e. at the time of agenda setting;

Ability to tap into the expertise and creativity of society as a whole or the internal stakeholders of an organisation in order to come up with innovative ideas for new services, policies, solutions etc.;

Ability to cluster similar ideas and manage duplications;

Ability to extract data and run reports;

Ability to create a “speak-up” innovation culture;

Ability to better integrate policy ideas;

Ability to keep the citizens’ satisfaction high through better engagement and trust in a transparent policy-making process.

For stakeholders (individuals or organisations with an interest or expertise in specific policy domains):

Ability to submit ideas and enrich existing one that affect them directly;

Ability to make their voice heard and be innovative in all policy domains;

Ability to co-create public services and solutions;

Ability to participate in a transparent policy-making process;

Ability to remain informed about a particular policy idea;

Ability to propose ideas in all policy domains.

4.2 Success Criteria

The high-level success criteria of the proposed solution are:

Public administrations can quickly produce a report of submitted policy ideas, outlining the key opinions and arguments, or other metrics such as identifying the extent to which policy ideas coming from stakeholders are part of the adopted policy.

Follow-up of policy ideas is:

- Provided for 90% of the tickets;

- Within a maximum timeframe agreed upon (based on resources’ availability vs. stakeholders’ expectations).

4.3 Assumptions and constraints

It is assumed that EU institutions have enough interest and commitment to invest resources in a platform for policy ideas crowdsourcing, and in the implementation process. It is assumed that the solution will process several EU official languages.

4.4 Scope

The scope of the solution is limited to the development of a platform solution for policy ideas crowdsourcing, focusing on the aspects outlined in the “Expected Outcomes”. The provision of additional raise awareness and community building services for supporting the uptake of the solution is out of scope. This however does not imply that their importance is not recognised.


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The solution will be made available to the EU institutions and Member States. The expected outcomes will be covered by one tool from a set of tools DIGIT intends to develop to support

Participatory knowledge for supporting decision making. This set of tools can be included in the Better

Regulation Toolbox, launched by the European Commission’s Secretariat-General. For additional

information, we refer the reader to Appendix 1: References and Related Documents.

Figure 1: Links between the business cases for corporate solutions supporting participatory knowledge for supporting decision making.

4.5 Solution Impact

The solution will positively impact processes supporting policy making, as follows:

Ensuring that policies respond to individuals’ needs and are relevant to their circumstances.

The stakeholders will be able to propose policy ideas on matters affecting them directly, without

the need to reach a vote threshold.

Collecting stakeholders’ innovative input and feedback. Policy makers will be able to tap into the expertise and creativity of society as a whole or of an internal stakeholders’ in order to come up with innovative ideas for new services, policies, solutions etc.

Stakeholders’ engagement. Civil servants will better engage stakeholders in the policy-making

cycle from a very early stage, at the time of the agenda setting. This will in turn have a positive

impact on how stakeholders perceive their contribution to the policy-making.

Re-inventing the wheel. By making the solution available as open-source, the reuse at national

and EU level will be promoted which, in turn, will decrease the risk of effort duplication.

Outreach. Stakeholders’ participation more evenly distributed across societal groups and

geographic regions.

The solution will increase the level of accountability of public administration, which in turn will positively

impact the level of trust from stakeholders.


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4.6 Deliverables

The main deliverables of the proposed solution is a software solution. However, the adoption of a new solution will imply the development of additional deliverables such as:

User manuals;

Technical documentation; and

Training material.

4.7 Risks

The main risks derived from the implementation of the proposed solution are the following:

There is organisational resistance from people who do not feel engaged with the new tool and process. This risk could be mitigated by conducting informative sessions highlighting the strengths of the tool and the objectives it allows to reach, as well as how it is aligned with the Better Regulation Guidelines in collecting feedback at every stage of the policy-lifecycle.

If the launch of the new solution is not supported by raising awareness and community building activities, there may still be limited or no stakeholder engagement. This risk could be mitigated by conducting community building and promotional activities.

Policy ideas that finally do not materialise or are not provided feedback on can impact the stakeholders’ interest, engagement and trust in the process. This risk could be mitigated by defining, communicating and following a detailed and transparent process for managing the solution’s outcome and a monitoring process to ensure it is followed.

If the mitigation measures are not effective, the risks can have an impact on a low perception of the long-term benefits and overcome of these risks might require additional time and means.

4.8 Costs, Effort and Funding Source

The costs, effort and funding source will be defined by the business case owner. The business case owner of the policy ideas crowdsourcing is DIGIT.

The external tasks currently foreseen are the following:

Project management

Business analysis & requirements

Development

Testing

Evolutive maintenance

Training documentation

Change management activities

The current estimation of external resources needed for the development of the service is ½ FTE per year.

The European Commission will only provide the tool to the Member States, and therefore the resources needed for the customisation and operations of this business case will need managing by each owner adopting the tool.

4.9 Roadmap

The current roadmap for the development of this business case is the following:

- The tool description (requirements) to be completed in 2016;

- the tool development to take place in 2016 and 2017; and

- the tool publication and offering to the EU institutions and Member States to take place between 2017 and 2018.


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4.10 Synergies and Interdependencies

In the European Commission, some synergies can be found among the initiatives that are being carried out. Several initiatives are identified:

The IDEA initiative tool, launched by DIGIT internally for ideas proposals in within DIGIT, and expanded to Policy officers to identify challenges in the policy-making cycle that could be optimised by ICT tools.

The Consul tool, used by Madrid City council in their “Madrid Decide” platform for policy ideas crowdsourcing and already reused by Barcelona and Oviedo city councils.

The “European Citizen’s Initiative” platform, where EU citizens can submit legislation ideas to the European Commission on matters where the EU has competence to legislate.

The Better Regulation toolbox, launched by the European’s Commission Secretariat General as a complement to the Better Regulation Guideline presented in in SWD(2015) 111.

5 GOVERNANCE

5.1 Project coordination

The DG that will coordinate the project is DG Informatics (DIGIT) together with the ISA2 Committee. DIGIT can nominate external suppliers to develop the technical part. However, DIGIT will be accountable for the delivery of the final solution and the support for its well-functioning.

5.2 Service Provider

The DG that will make the final solution available to other DGs and/or Member states is DG Informatics (DIGIT).

Within the Commission and EU Member States public administrations, the solution will be provided as a tool.

5.3 Associated services/stakeholders

The associated services will take part in the definition of the requirements, the performance, the guidance and/or providing lessons learnt of the project.

The identified associated services for this project are the following:

- DG CNECT;

- DIGIT; and

- SG.

A list of additional potential associated services and stakeholders for the project implementation have been identified in the above section The current roadmap for the development of this business case is the following:

- The tool description (requirements) to be completed in 2016;

- the tool development to take place in 2016 and 2017; and

- the tool publication and offering to the EU institutions and Member States to take place between 2017 and 2018.

Synergies and Interdependencies.

5.4 Beneficiaries

The beneficiaries of the project will be the European institutions and Member States’ public administrations. During the project, the beneficiaries will be represented by the ISA2 Committee.


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APPENDIX 1: REFERENCES AND RELATED DOCUMENTS

ID Reference or Related Document Source or Link/Location

1 Better Regulation toolbox http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/guidelines/docs/br_toolbox_en.pdf

2 The European Citizens’ Initiative http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome

3 D03.01: Business cases for corporate e-Participation solutions

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/CITnet/confluence/x/0AFWH

http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/guidelines/docs/br_toolbox_en.pdf

http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/guidelines/docs/br_toolbox_en.pdf

http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome

http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome



