A Technological Shaping of the Social in Evidence-Based Policymaking Platforms

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Anders Madsen, whose focus is on design choices in policy-oriented technologies of knowledge management. This operates in the context of discussions over the role of knowledge in democracy – how is the relevance of information and facts settled? Two divergent approaches to this highlight the role of science in generating evidence-based policy (which responds to well-defined problems), or alternatively see a range of wicked problems that need broad participation and socially robust policies.

Digital democracy can aid policymaking in these contexts; policymaking procedures can be grounded in new technologies of knowledge management – but this too is either simply about efficient and transparent data-sharing, or about the collaborative production of knowledge, reflecting the earlier division. Some of this leads to discussions of Web design - for example drawing on clearly structured Semantic Web developments, or more folksonomically organised Web 2.0 structures.

Each technology has an interpretive flexibility which relevant social groups close through rhetorical means. Functionality and problem definitions are flexible, but will solidify into specific paradigms; the computerisation movement advocates the development of specific computer-based systems and models, for example, while a digital choices approach highlights the impact of the specific technological choices made here.

What solutions do specific technological action frames provide, them? Anders examined the UK Policygrid and the EU Feed sites as examples, comparing them across a number of parameters. Policygrid was framed as an evidence-based policymaking initiative – focussing on quality decision making, and a basis in fact, and contrasted with short-sighted, politically-determined, opinion-driven decision making.

The portal was based on a provenance framework (tracking the origins and context of individual datasets imported into the system), an argumentation support system (building on a defined set of ontologies), and a metadata support system (which enables any of this). This is a very structured, computer science way of thinking about this, and did not work as planned – there was a constant struggle between the envisaged structured approach and the actual, more complex uses made of the site by actual participants.

This indicates a problem of balance between the technological frameworks and the needs of specific users and user groups. This poses technical problem solutions for core democratic problems, which tends not to generate usable results; it tends to formalise qualitative analysis, and to claim that difficult qualitative problems can be solved through enhanced technological means – an attempt at a technological shaping of the social.