There are a no of developments that influence the traditional way of policy-making, including social media as a medium to interact with the public, blogs, open data, freedom of information, the wisdom of the crowds, open collaboration and transparency in policy simulation, agent-based simulation and hybrid modeling techniques which open new ways of innovative policy-making. Whereas traditional policy-making is executed by experts, now the public is involved to fulfill requirements of good governance according to open government principles.
I would like to discuss on the development is The Availability of Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD)
Policy-making heavily depends on data about existing policies and situations to make decisions.
Both public and private organizations are opening their data for use by others. Although information could be requested for in the past, governments have changed their strategy toward actively publishing open data in formats that are readily and easily accessible. Multiple perspectives are needed to make use of and stimulate new practices based on open data.
New applications and innovations can be based solely on open data, but often open data are enriched with data from other sources. As data can be generated and provided in huge amounts, specific needs for processing, curation, linking, visualization, and maintenance appear. The latter is often denoted with big data in which the value is generated by combining different datasets. Current advances in processing power and memory allows for the processing of a huge amount of data. BOLD allows for analyzing policies and the use of these data in models to better predict the effect of new policies.
References:
- Janssen, M., Wimmer, M. A., & Deljoo, A. (Eds.). (2015). Policy practice and digital science: Integrating complex systems, social simulation and public administration in policy research (Vol. 10). Springer.
- Janssen M, CharalabidisY, Zuiderwijk A (2012) Benefits, adoption barriers and myths of open data and open government. Inform Syst Manage 29(4):258-268
- Janssen M, Estevez E, Janowski T (2014) Interoperability in big, open, and linked data organizational maturity, capabilities, and data portfolios. Computer 47(10):26-31