The Feed project
Feed is part of the European funded eParticipation programme http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/egovernment/implementation/prep_action/index_en.htm . It is one of the 8 research initiatives aimed at showing the possibilities of ICT technologies to include citizens , business and other players into the deliberation process. They are to be showcases http://www.ep-momentum.eu/ of participation, eDemocracy and improved decision making. Feed is coordinated by the University of Athens, Greece. The Dutch part of Feed consists of Flevoland, Zenc and the University of Amsterdam. For them Feed is an opportunity to combine the knowledge obtained from the (eContent) ADDWIJZER project with the advanced Flevoland infrastructure. This effort is called the “What-is-allowed-where-Map” initiative or Legal Atlas. The “what-is-allowed-where-Map” (or watmagwaarkaart in Dutch) had been investigated by Zenc under guidance of the Ministry of interior and two regions had been highlighted as probably fruitful grounds showing the useful combination of Laws and Maps: Flevoland and the city of Eindhoven.
Zenc started Addwijzer in 2004 with help from the IDL in the UK and the Province of South Holland in the Netherlands. ADDwijzer showed that maps can be used to provide business and citizens with information about optimal chances for tricky allocation problems, often called Nimby-problems (not in my back yard). Maps turned out to be very well suited to express administrative legal constraints in understandable and comparable ways. It was judged much more user friendly than the usual text search by different players involved.
Figuur 1: addwijzer
The work of the university of Amsterdam added another vital part of the equation; how to navigate from (legal) texts to maps in maintainable ways. It had been easy to navigate from maps to texts. You just klick on the map and a pop-up shows the available legal documents.
The Legal Atlas concept supports the “inverse question” from legal text to application area on the map. The inverse question enables a very interesting query type for the user at the other side of the government counter: the “show me all the area’s where I might have a chance to actually do this” - type of query; or the inverse government service query.
This inverse service query affords two new types of government support for activities of citizens:
- it enables the client of government to get a more precise answer than entering a keyword in a legal database
- it enables generation of a regional optimization of possibilities versus constraints.
Geopolis and Feed apply the semantic standardisation meant for spatial planning (IMRO) , include these with the European thesaurus initiative Gemet http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet and upgrade them to a maintainable RDF /OWL structure for answering queries related to recreational facilities, housing or environmental issues like NATURA2000. The Platform will generate maps with coloured area’s of problems and opportunities, providing issues, relevant documents and research reports. This is partly related to the formal policy cycle of the Omgevingsplan, the regional development plan and partly for the generation, sharing and discussion of ideas, simulations and visions of third parties.
Figuur 2 Legal atlas
The facility to query maps for problems and opportunities will be combined with discussion Fora, on line video streaming of meetings and formal decision process information to enable deliberation about “hot” discussion items. The UK company Public-I provides the video streaming platform for discussion support. This platform is unique in the sense that one does not have to look at two hours of boring council meeting. The trick is that the Video clips are “annotated” with tags that enable search for the relevant 10 minutes of a meeting the player is really interested in.
To further support the involvement of interested players in the policy formulation, Geopolis and Feed will apply light weight maps like google maps and interactive contour drawing for informal discussion support. Discussions will be concentrated around user scenario’s set by the agenda of the Public authority. Some discussion will be initiated by the citizens themselves in the future. Foreign research on attempts at citizen consultation like the Estonian TOM-portal https://www.eesti.ee/tom/ideas.py/avaleht and the UK http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ have shown that expectation management ,especially about the perception of influence is crucial. Business and citizens have to be informed very clearly what the rules of engagement are and what can and cannot be promised with their input.
It is relatively simple to enable a farmer to know if he receives subsidies for turning his agricultural land area into “green” protected land. It is much more complex to moderate a discussion about the NATURA2000 objectives versus the SME’s that lose their job when enforcement is put into action.