MODERATED POLICY DISCOURSE VS. NON-

MODERATED CROWDSOURCING IN SOCIAL

NETWORKS – A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

Dimitris Koryzis*/Fotis Fitsilis**/Günther Schefbeck***

*Head of department, Hellenic Parliament, European Programs Implementation Service

Amalias 14, 10557 Athens, GR

dkoryzis@parliament.gr

**Hellenic Parliament, Scientific Service

Amalias 14, 10557 Athens, GR

fitsilisf@parliament.gr

***Head of department, Austrian Parliamentary Administration, department „Parliamentary Documentation, Archives,

and Statistics“

Dr. Karl Renner-Ring 3, 1017 Vienna, AT

guenther.schefbeck@parlament.gv.at

Keywords: Policy making, legislation, participation, e-democracy, crowdsourcing

Abstract: The paper is dealing with moderated and non-moderated policy discussions in Social

Networks and how we can collect the citizens’ opinions and input them to the policy

making process in a proper and efficient way. It also investigates whether recent

technological developments in ‘e-consultation’ and ‘e-democracy’ could be easily

used in the formal legislative procedures of European Parliaments. Do we hear what

the citizens want to say? Do we use fresh, innovative and complementary ideas in the

formal policy making cycle? What is the added value of the recent research projects

in the field? A systematic approach is used, comparing non-moderated

crowdsourcing and moderated debates in virtual spaces.

1. The background: the legislative process in Greece

During the execution of two European Commission funded research projects (+Spaces and

NOMAD), the Greek legislative procedure was used as a case study to approximate major issues

that are directly connected with citizens’ participation in policy through Social Networks. Of

course, policy making is not just a privilege of the central Government or the Legislative power in

EU Member States. Many applications of moderated or non-moderated discussions in Social

Networks can be also found in the local administration environment. This paper focuses on the

exploiting of the possibilities offered by the social media to governmental officials and more

explicitly to parliamentarians in order to listen to the citizens in a more direct and efficient way.

In the following schema, the basic framework of the legislative process in Greece is presented,

starting from the Government initiative, or more precisely from the initiative of a Minister.

Evidently, there are two main stages: the legislative drafting until the draft law is submitted to the

Parliament, and the debate on the proposed piece of legislation until the final vote in the plenary and

the approval of the law. All the possible users and actors in this procedure are highlighted on the

left. This framework is applied to any individual policy cycle.

Figure 1: Legislative procedure in Greece

This schematic diagram also shows a time frame within which the citizens (individually or through

organizations and representatives) may interact with the law makers during the legislative

procedure. First, this is possible in the phase when a ministry is putting a draft bill for the first time

online for public consultation. This phase is already covered by appropriate sites, like the

www.opengov.gr initiative, which uses mainly a moderated blog approach, where comments can be

placed and categorized in the various articles of the draft law. A second phase that was addressed

for the use of social networking in the legislative procedure is the relatively narrow time frame of

15 days after a draft law was submitted to the Committees of the Hellenic Parliament. Finally, the

third phase of citizen participation is after the law has been voted. This third and longer period with

no specific end can be used by citizens and interest groups to express their opinion on the new

legislation, somehow assisting the parliamentarians in controlling the governmental work, and

preparing or starting a new policy cycle.

2. E-democracy: the recent evolution

The European e-Government Action Plan for the period 2011-2015 defines as a strategic priority

the empowerment of citizens, businesses and other organizations through the use of new

technological tools. Such empowerment would aim at giving them access to better services,

designed around their needs and in collaboration with them, while, at the same time, allowing their

effective involvement in the policy making process.

In this context, policy makers face a task of unprecedented complexity and difficulty, as traditional

policy making approaches used so far seem incapable of capturing the society’s increasingly

complex and interconnected nature1 and do not manage to involve in the overall process all

important stakeholders, whose interests are affected by decisions on policies, as well as individuals

in spite of their working environment, financial condition, social presence and consequently their

well-being being dependent on the policies formulated.

In parallel, thanks to the last evolutions in the Web and especially in the Social Networks, we have

witnessed a historical transition to a new era of collaboration, interaction, sharing and networked

intelligence. The advent of social networks provides new avenues for influence2 and eventually

opens up new perspectives for policy makers by using crowdsourcing to enlarge and enhance

policy-advisory processes, policy making, and policy feedback3.

A new age of engagement has thus emerged, leveraging social media for policy making as they

facilitate the requisite level of collaboration both globally and locally to solve complex issues that

would otherwise be impossible to address4.

Taking into account the last Digital Agenda 2020 and Policy Making 3.0, the participatory and

evidence-based model used by Digital Futures5, stakeholders and policy makers form a social

network to co-design policies on the basis of the metaphor of "collective brain" (or emergent

collective intelligence) with two distinct factors:

The scientific evidence stemming from the collective wisdom of stakeholders and policy

makers. This is the collective "rational" contribution of the participants to the policy (or the

"left brain" of the social network). Evidence is often elicited from data and numerical

models of the real world (e.g., statistics, data mining).

The sentiment stemming from the collective aspirations of stakeholders and policy makers,

identifiable or even measurable through the social network. This can be considered the

"emotional" contribution of the network participants to the policy (or the "right brain" of the

social network).

The Digital Futures' model for participatory and evidence based policy making scales up the

metaphor of the "left and right brains" to the social network to make current policy making

processes more participatory, transparent and agile.

3. Moderated or non-moderated discussions in Social Networks

The EC FP7 project +Spaces (Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces6) uses existing social media

spaces as the societal “sandbox” for modelling real world behaviour. One of the project’s principal

drivers was to engage citizens from different online communities by utilizing these virtual spaces

for assisting policy makers in reaching out and gaining insight from the citizens about their opinions

1 Charalabidis, Yannis/Lampathaki, Fenareti/Misuraca, Gianluca/Osimo, David (2012), ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling:

Research Challenges and Future Prospects in Europe, in: Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System

Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, pp.2472-2481.

2 Christakis, Nicholas/Fowler, James (2010), Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives,

London.

3 Nam, Taewoo (2012), Suggesting frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government 2.0, in: Government Information Quarterly,

29(1), pp. 12-20.

4 Bertot, John C./Jaeger, Paul T./Grimes, Justin M. (2010), Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social

media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies, in: Government Information Quarterly, 27(3), pp. 264-271,

http://www.milthailand.org/phocadownload/2011_Files/11_Nov/transpareny%20government.pdf.

5 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/policy-making-30-0.

6 http://www.positivespaces.eu.

and potential acceptance of new policies. The +Spaces platform creates and deploys applications in

virtual spaces (Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Open Wonderland), which provide information about

the policy with clear description of the policy topic, pre-defined roles, selected keywords, standard

questions and moderated statements, guiding the public to react to it in various ways with pure

moderated way: well defined and structured Polls and Debates and Role Playing Simulation, in

which the citizens are invited to take upon themselves a role different than their own, and express

thoughts and opinions from the point of view of the respective role, thus reaching new insights and

understanding various aspects of the policy. The following table is to present the added value for

different stages of the legislative procedures in the policy making cycle, the +Spaces tools used and

the actors involved:

Figure 2: The functionalities of the +Spaces tools in the legislative process

The lessons learnt from the +Spaces pilots implemented for the Hellenic Parliament were:

Through the +Spaces platform it was possible to address several public groups, on different

stages of the policy making process

+Spaces was able to support policy makers’ presence in Social Networks

Advanced role-playing simulation creating fresh ideas for policy makers

Data analysis with graphs, sentiment clusters, highlights and citizens’ reputation scores pro-

vides a clear and short overview of the policy discussion

Policy makers were enabled to post simple questions in polls, brief policy descriptions and a

couple of statements for debates to get feedback from citizens

3D & 2D role-playing or 3D debates are something new with a touch of innovation, looking like

a brainstorming game or a place where fresh ideas are born

The +Spaces platform could be used as a policy marketing tool

The EC FP7 project NOMAD (Policy formulation & validation through non-moderated

crowdsourcing7), on the other hand, will provide policy makers with fully automated solutions for

content search, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the

policy-making arena. Thereby, the policy makers could monitor social media discourses and listen

to the citizens, gather feedback to the draft policy making agenda as well as the draft policies,

obtain inputs to the policy making process by collecting opinions, arguments, and sentiments,

visualize and analyse the non-moderated “wisdom of crowds”8, while collaborating, if possible,

with the citizens at a later stage.

The NOMAD tools will be capable of crawling the social media for opinions, classifying them as

supporting or opposing the suggested policy and its justification, and presenting the evaluated

opinions via the analysis and visualization interface. This interface will support the quantitative and

qualitative analysis, comparison, and identification of congruence of the proposed policy and the

current buzz in the social media, covering most of their major types (e.g., Twitter, Blogger,

Wordpress, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, news sites, forums).

Thus, the policy maker could examine the citizens’ arguments, positions, comments, opinions and

stakes, and transfer them into a clear and concrete report. NOMAD will provide policy arguments

and the citizens’ opinions plus their demographics (gender/age, geographical location, profession),

as well as surveys of the concepts that most prominently appear in social media. Such information

can prove invaluable for refining the policy agenda. Additionally, NOMAD will provide a

quantitative and qualitative support tool to extract the citizens’ opinions, comments and

suggestions, allowing an assessment of the policy in total.

Figure 3: Schematic view of the NOMAD concept

7 http://www.nomad-project.eu.

8 Surowiecki, James (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes

Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, London

The NOMAD project started in 2012, with identifying the user requirements. The initial outcomes

are the following:

Policy makers deem it important to get access to the current policy related discussions in the

social media

Currently, it is difficult to receive all reactions to draft policies properly displayed for an effec-

tive use

Feedback to the discourses in the policy making arena, and particularly in Parliament, was to be

obtained in real time, based on citizens’ reactions in the social media

However, policy makers would not be able to initiate a communicative intercourse with the citi-

zens by only using the “wisdom of crowds” from the social media

4. Conclusions

Real-life experience has proved there are many unsolved challenges in policy making, which

restrain policy makers from providing sustainable and inclusive decisions and citizens from getting

engaged in policy discussions. Public policy issues are not always appealing, and citizens fail to

understand the relevance of the issues and to see "what's in it for me", which would be reflected in a

decline in the voters’ turnout and a lack of trust in politicians that is shown by opinion polls. While

the Internet has long promised an opportunity for widespread involvement, e-participation

initiatives often struggle to generate active and regular participation9, and there is a huge gap

between the technological advancements and the everyday active participation of citizens in the

policy-making processes. Previous research projects (like, e.g., LEX-IS or VoiceS) and their pilots

were mostly dedicated to closed groups of users (up to 200 in most cases) but failed to involve the

public at large.

The lack of comprehensible and down-to-earth visualizations for easing out the complexity in

policy decisions, the under-performance of existing policy models in conjunction with simulation

mechanisms, and the insufficient use of the huge amounts of data that are available on the web, are

among the important issues that need to be tackled in order to take the leap forward in policy

making. Therefore, ICT tools still have untapped potential and remain a “novelty” for the majority

of government systems, despite their already acknowledged benefits in their application by

governments related to the quality and speed of policy making, as well as to evidence-based policy

decision making10

.

Having in mind the observed difficulties in not only getting citizens engaged but also sustainably

conserving their readiness to participate in policy making discourses, non-moderated crowdsourcing

seems to be a realistic alternative or supplement to the more formalized policy related discourses

that need to be initiated and moderated, in some way, by some actor of the government system. In

the social media in general, the discussions, of course, will never be as clearly structured as they

can, and should, be in the fora specifically dedicated to policy discourse, or even in environments

established to support formalized consultation procedures on draft legislation. Thus, such focused

crowdsourcing raises a particular challenge to the technical tools applied, and this is just the

challenge accepted by the NOMAD project.

9 Crossover (2012), International Research Roadmap on ICT Tools for Governance and Policy Modelling, Interim Version,

http://crossover-

project.eu/Portals/0/Material/0204F01%20International%20Research%20Roadmap%20on%20ICT%20Tools%20for%20Governance

%20and%20Policy%20Modelling.pdf.

10 Charalabidis, Yannis/Lampathaki, Fenareti/Askounis, Dimitris (eds.) (2010), Paving the Way for Future Research in ICT for

Governance and Policy Modelling, http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/files/2010/02/CROSSROAD_Book-vf-allinon.pdf.

When comparing, from the point of view of policy making support, the options of non-moderated

crowdsourcing, on the one hand, and moderated discourse, in the other hand, and their feasibility,

one will have to differentiate between the various stages of the policy cycle:

At the initial stage of political agenda setting, it will be necessary to identify societal

requests for new policies and policy changes as early as possible, and within a scope as

broad as possible. Thus, any kind of moderation might already narrow the scope of debate,

so that this seems to be the stage of the policy cycle most appropriate to be supported by

non-moderated crowdsourcing. The free flow of public discourse within civil society, as

mirrored in the social media, is to be analyzed, and all subjects of pertinence to the policy

making agenda, along with the yet rough opinions of the members of civil society on what

directions to follow in these issues, are to be extracted.

Once the political agenda, in a mid-term range, has been set, it is up to the main actors of the

political system, i.e. the political parties that have the task to aggregate societal positions,

but in some cases also the major interest groups, to prepare concrete policy proposals to

tackle the issues put on the agenda. At this stage, moderated debates already make more

sense, for there is already a limited number of alternative policy options to be put to a debate

that has to be formally initiated by the actors of the political system. Nonetheless, there still

may be some risk that some fundamental option has not yet been identified, so that the

crowdsourcing approach will be a valuable supplement to moderated debate, in particular as

long as the political system has not been successful in engaging larger numbers of the

members of civil society in such moderated debates. One major argument against formalized

public consultation at the policy formulating stage comes from the experience that such a

procedure might be used by small groups of activists, i.e. citizens showing an engagement

far above the ordinary for a particular issue, to dominate the debate, and strain the outcome.

Such effect indeed may be balanced by a complementary crowdsourcing approach.

Once the basic policy decision, i.e. the political (usually not yet normative) decision on the

objectives to be followed and the means to be applied for that purpose, has been made, the

policy regularly is transposed into a draft normative act, mostly a draft bill, which in the

majority of cases is done by the legislative experts in the competent government agencies.

Such draft bills in most normative systems are put to a formal consultation procedure, which

would anyway include the main stakeholders but sometimes also the general public.

Commenting on draft bills would require some expertise in legislative drafting techniques as

well as in the substantive matter to be regulated. Thus, this usually would be a stage of well-

structured expert debate, with the general public continuing to reflect on the general policy

directions, which reflections however would be of decreasing influence, for the basic

directions already having been defined. Non-moderated crowdsourcing therefore will play a

minor role at this stage.

The latter in principle would also apply to the stage of parliamentary decision-making. At

this stage, the finishing is done on the draft legal acts, but because it is done in a transparent

way civil society will reflect on it more intensively again. Thus, even though a major change

in the policy direction is unlikely to happen at this late and final stage in the legislative

process, there is a vivid interest by the political decision-makers in learning about these

public reactions, which would challenge their communicative capacity to be displayed in the

parliamentary arena. Non-moderated crowdsourcing, therefore, is an important option again,

in this concluding phase of law-making, because it would give the MPs important hints

about how to explain the decision made to the public (or, from the point of view of

parliamentary opposition, how to argue against it).

Finally, the adopted and promulgated law is to be implemented. This process will not only

be monitored by the MPs but also, in an informal way, by civil society. Establishing

feedback cycles therefore is an important means to enable the actors of the political system

to analyze the impact of legal measures and distinguish between possible lackings in the

implementation of the regulations adopted and lackings in the regulations themselves.

Identifying lackings of the latter kind will prompt a new policy cycle. Since this monitoring

requires a wide and open focus on a policy field, crowdsourcing seems to be an appropriate

approach again.

Summarizing, one may assume the more thematic openness is required in a discussion, the more

useful seems to be a non-moderated crowdsourcing approach. The more, on the other hand, the

scope of a discussion is narrowed down to a limited set of alternatives, and the better structured a

discourse needs to be, the more efficient seems to be an approach based on the concept of

moderated debate. Since the policy making and law making process comprises stages of both kinds,

one may conclude that a combination of non-moderated crowdsourcing data analysis with well-

defined moderated debate is the key towards better embedding this process in civil society policy

discourses, and thereby contributing to more substantively legitimizing legislation.