A Gamified Crowdsourcing Framework for Data-Driven Co-creation of Policy Making and Social Foresight (by Andrea Tocchetti and Marco Brambilla)

Over the last decades, communication between governments and citizens has become a remarkable problem. Governments’ decisions are not always aligned with the visions of the citizens about the future. Achieving such alignment requires cooperation between communities and public institutions. Therefore, it’s important to find a way to innovate governance and policymaking, developing new ways to harness the potential of public engagement and participatory foresight in complex governance decisions. In this paper we propose a comprehensive framework that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning, aiming to improve the collective engagement and contribution of the crowd in policy-making decisions. Our approach brings together social networking, gamification, and data analysis practices for extracting relevant and coordinated future vision concerning public policies. The framework is validated through two experiments with citizens and policy-making domain experts. The findings confirm the effectiveness of the framework principles and provide useful feedback for future development.