NOMAD · Policy Formulation and Validation through non moderated crowdsourcing

Collaboration and crowdsourcing are the realities of today's public Internet. The so-called Web 2.0" represents a precious repository of thematic information, thanks to the heterogeneous content that is inserted daily and spontaneously updated by its users. Very recently, a big commercial interest has started to arise – especially within industries that manufacture consumer goods and services – in acquiring, classifying and managing all product related information that emerges out of Web 2.0 channels, thus going beyond the known capabilities of consolidated search engines. It would be possible to use this insight to information at multiple stages of the policy-life cycle to support the definition of the political agenda, the creation, the implementation and the monitoring of policy proposals.In this context, modern politicians could test, detect and understand how citizens perceive their own political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web (e.g. forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups and wikis), so as to gather useful feedback for immediate (re)action. In this way, politicians can create a stable feedback loop between information gathered on the Web and the definition of their political agendas based on this contribution. The ability to leverage the vast amount of user-generated content for supporting governments in their political decisions requires new ICT tools that will be able to analyze and classify the opinions expressed on the informal Web, or stimulate responses, as well as to put data from sources as diverse as blogs, online opinion polls and government reports to an effective use.To this end, NOMAD aims to introduce these different new dimensions into the experience of policy making by providing decision-makers with fully automated solutions for content search, selection, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena."