Title: Designing information ecosystems to process citizen input and improve public sector decision making

Authors: Ram Gopalan

Addresses: School of Business, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 227, Penn Street, Camden, NJ 08102, USA

Abstract: Recent advances in technology and social media have enabled average, individual citizens to forcefully voice their opinions on various public-sector issues. To fully harvest this new tide of technology-enabled activism, information ecosystems must be proactively designed and scientifically managed to receive and process citizen input. In this paper, an activist is a term broadly used to connote any citizen interested in engaging in participative government, usually mediated by the use of technology. The collective set of measures that need to be rigorously undertaken to bring citizen activism to fruition is referred to as activism science in this paper. This position paper examines five case studies wherein citizen activism has already proved successful. The learning's from these case studies leads to a synthetic proposal for managing activism scientifically, incorporating citizen inputs, management science models, technology and data architectures and suitable participative process design. The proposed activism science framework (ASF) is applied to envision improvements in the delivery of online education and urban services.

Keywords: smart government; open data portals; public sector decision making.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2020.110587

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2020 Vol.13 No.4, pp.387 - 416

Received: 10 Apr 2019
Accepted: 29 Apr 2019
Published online: 26 Oct 2020 *

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