UbiPOL · Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy Making

UbiPOL aims to develop a ubiquitous platform that allows citizens be involved in policy making processes (PMPs) regardless their current locations and time. It is suggested that the more citizens find connections between their as-usual life activities and relevant policies, the more they become pro-active or motivated to be involved in the PMPs. For this reason, UbiPOL aims to provide context aware knowledge provision with regard to policy making. That is citizens using UbiPOL will be able to identify any relevant policies and other citizen's opinion whenever they want wherever they are according to their as-usual life pattern. With the platform, citizens are expected to be more widely aware of any relevant policies and PMPs for involvement during their as-usual life therefore improved engagement and empowerment. Also, the platform will provide policy tracking functionality via a workflow engine and opinion tag concept to improve the transparency of the policy making processes. Finally, the platform enable policy makers to collect citizen opinions more efficiently as the opinions are collected as soon as they are created in the middle of citizen's usual life. UbiPOL is provides security and identity management facility to ensure only authorised citizens can have access to relevant policies according to their roles in policy making processes. The delivery of the opinion and policy data over the wireless network is secure as the platform use leading edge encryption algorithm in its communication kernels. UbiPOL is a scalable platform ensuring at least 100,000 citizens can use the system at the same time (for example, for e-Voting applications) via its well proven automatic load balancing mechanisms. The privacy ensuring opinion mining engine prevents unwanted revealing of citizen identities and the mining engine prevents any unrelated commercial advertisements are included in the opinion base to minimise misuse of the system.