Open Collaboration in Policy Development: Concept and Architecture to Integrate Scenario Development and Formal Policy Modelling

Abstract

Along the demands for good governance and open government, policymakers need concise, reliable and up-to-date information to respond to society’s problems and affairs in an efficient and effective way. Likewise, stakeholders affected by a particular policy call for transparency, accountability and trustworthiness in political decision-making. Along the evolution of information society that leads to increasing digitisation of information and knowledge artefacts and public services, citizens more and more request direct involvement in policymaking. In this chapter, we introduce a comprehensive and innovative approach to collaborative policy development. The approach integrates collaborative scenario building and formal policy modelling via an integrated ICT toolbox. Stakeholders are collaboratively involved in the scenario development as well as in the evaluation of simulation outcomes. To bridge the gap between narrative texts of stakeholder-generated scenarios (evidenced through background documents of the policy to be discussed) and formal policy models (generating model-based scenarios), the approach introduces conceptual modelling, which enables the different stakeholders to better understand the policy context and to support semi-automatic transformation of text statements into formal statements and agent descriptions. A consequence of the agent-based modelling approach used is that the justifications for expectations of the stakeholders are made precise, explicit and linked to evidence, and this process provides for the monitoring of ongoing policy implementation.