Defining the Future of Decision and Policy Making through Big Data (Workshop 3.3)

SESSION DESCRIPTION & OBJECTIVES

It can be taken for granted that technological advancements, especially in the last decade, have revolutionized the way that both every day and complex activities are conducted. It is indicative that practically all expectations regarding innovation, regardless of the domain of application, are most of the time directly linked with the exploitation of emerging technologies, as well as with the constantly increasing volume of available data.

It is, thus, expected that a particularly important actor, such as the public sector, should constitute a successful disruption paradigm through the adoption of novel approaches and state-of-the-art ICTs. New concepts, especially those that consider the available data as a way of ensuring accurate and meaningful input to public sector organisations that can help establish new types of evidence-informed policies, are of the utmost importance. However, despite the investments continuously performed and initiatives implemented during the last years in the field of public sector modernisation, it is really hard to allege that “we are already there” when it comes to full exploitation of ICT innovations and data towards aiding the public sector to meet the societal and financial challenges that are emerging.

In this context, Big Policy Canvas (BPC) EU funded project would like to offer its perspective on how barriers that impede big data driven modernisation in policymaking can be overcome. BPC aims at renovating the public sector on a cross-border level by mapping the needs of public administrations with methods, technologies, tools and applications from both the public & the private sector, stepping upon the power of open innovation and the rich opportunities for analysis and informed policy making generated by big data. As a result, the project will deliver a live roadmap that will propose short and midterm milestones and relevant actions needed towards achieving the expected impacts for the public sector and the society at large. In this workshop, BPC would like to present to the audience the results produced so far and engage the participants in the co-design of the live roadmap.

• First part of the workshop (15′)

Nuria Rodríguez will present a series of results released by the Big Policy Canvas project, and she will explain how they can be mapped into some priorities already highlighted in previous BDVA sessions linked to Big Data for Public administrations (under TF7-Smart Cities Subgroup). In particular she will present the following project outcomes: Knowledge Base with needs, trends and assets, Assessment Framework, Roadmap. The objective of this slot is to receive feedback from BDVA members and other relevant stakeholders active in this domain.

• Second part (the interactive session 1h10’)

Francesco Mureddu will present future research challenges and application scenarios related to the use of big data in policy making. These challenges and scenarios have been proposed by Big Policy Canvas Experts Committee and the objective is that the participants discuss about them in a collaborative manner (using game-storming techniques) in order to give valuable insights for the production of the Roadmap. A representative of Tartu University (Estonia) will give a short talk after the presentation of the challenges to ignite the discussion.

More specifically, Francesco Mureddu will cluster the research challenges according to the topic also considering the trends and needs analysis carried out in the project, and will divide the audience in groups according to each cluster. Each group will be facilitated by one of the consortium members, and will be given a sheet of paper. The facilitator of each group will present the challenges related to each cluster and the attendants will answer a set of questions on each challenge:

• Do you agree with this challenge? Can you elaborate?
• Why is this challenge important? Which need of the policy maker does it address? How the research stemming from each challenge will be used?
• After all the challenges are discussed the attendants will answer the final question:
  Do you want to add any other challenge?

AGENDA

• Welcome and introduction – Nuria Rodríguez
• Keynote – Raffaele Lillo (The Digital Transformation Team).
• Roadmap with innovative implementation directions for (big) data-driven policy-making – Francesco Mureddu (Interactive session)
• Challenges of the use of Big Data in Digital Government – Mihkel Solvak, Internal Research Cooperation, University of Tartu
• Wrap up and further steps – Esther Garrido