European Debates on-line forum

Slovenia pilot use case conferences presentations

VIDI - Visualising the Impact of the legislation by analysing public DIscussions using statistical means (no: EP-08-01-014)

VIDI project leaflet 2009 (373.08 Kb)

pdf

VIDI project short description (380.53 Kb)

VIDI represents a very innovative technological solution, based on the powerful combination of the linguistic and statistic analysis of the text documents (discussions) in order to extract information from them, known as Text Mining, which enables further, extensive, sentiment-based analyses of the discussions, known as Opinion Mining, inclusive estimating their impact on the legislation and the "cost" of implementing the legislation. We use novel visualization techniques for presenting different views on the information and enabling efficient navigation through this large information space. In particular, VIDI will provide an efficient toolset for an advance visualization of messages posted in an on-line discussion forum, that will support "monitoring“ and analyzing discussions. The ultimate goal is a better understanding of emerging arguments and ideas contributing to the policy making process. VIDI project home page http://vidi-project.eu/.

Slovenia pilot use case on-line Citizen's forum European debates

Slovene use case Citizen's forum European debates is providing a national on-line deliberation space for facilitated public debates and consultations on relevant European issues. The main goal of on-line forum is to establish a permanent on-line dialogue between Slovene public (citizens, NGOs , civil society) and European decision-making institutions (primarily Slovene members of the European parliament) on current EU policies and topics. Inputs submitted by the public are summarized into reports by facilitators with the help of VIDI tools and sent to MEPs to provide feedback and mass media. Different web 2.0 application like Facebook, You Tube, RSS and Twitter are used to involve public on-line combined with video streaming and chat rooms covering live events. The on-line Citizen's forum is supported by the European Parliament Information Office in Slovenia and facilitated and administrated by the Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA) which aims to a pilot assessment of e-democratic impacts of on-line forum at the European parliament level. Slovenia pilot use case home page http://www.evropske-volitve.si/. More information pdf VIDI use case presentation - Slovenia (299 kb) by Simon Delakorda & Matej Delakorda.

Text Visualization & Architecture

Visualization is commonly used in data analysis to help the user in getting an initial idea about the raw data as well as a visual representation of the regularities obtained in the analysis. In the case of textual data, visualization can help understanding, discovery and summarization the topics which are discussed in the text. If the time dimension is present in the data, this can be used to further show how specific topics emerge or disappear through time. Visualization can further help understand the context and relationships of objects (named-entities), which are described in a text corpus. The main challenge in the visualization of a document corpus is to map all the documents into a two dimensional vector space so we can plot them on a computer screen. Ideally they would be positioned in such a way that the distance between two documents would correspond to the content similarity between them. In the case that the time plays an important role, the visualization approach reflects this dimension as well. VIDI platform consists of four main components, which will be generally described in the following text: Crawler, Feature Extractor, Analyzer and Visualizator. More information about technical approach is available at http://vidi-project.eu/root/web/vidiw.nsf/do?open&lang=en&page=technical.

On-line Citizen's forum European debates reports & feedbacks

1. Reports from on-line consultations with Slovene members of the European parliament:

- Report from on-line consultation pdf "How we will overcome the climate change?" (409 kb) with MEP Romana Jordan Cizelj (EPP). The 17 page report in Slovene language summarizing 43 posts published on-line. 18th of December 2009.

- Report from on-line consultation pdf

"Should the EU positively discriminate in case of employment?" (561 kb) with MEP Jelko Kacin (ALDE). The 12 page report in Slovene language summarizing 56 posts published on-line. 20th of October 2009.

2. Reports from on-line debates on European issues:

- Report from on-line debate pdf "What do we expect from the members of the European parliament in the next mandate?" (143 kb). The 9 page report in Slovene language summarizing 115 posts published on-line. 21th of May 2009.

3. Feedbacks from the Slovene MEPs and European elections political parties candidates:

- MEP Romana Jordan Cizelj consultation feedback.

- MEP Jelko Kacin consultation feedback.

- pdf Political parties candidates competing at the European elections feedbacks (202 kb). 22 public feedbacks from 10 out of 12 competing political parties.

- The list of all feedbacks on reports from facilitators and forum posts from individuals provided by the Slovene members of the European parliament and European elections political parties candidates.

4. Other reports from the Citizen's forum European debates:

- pdf "Unit 6 of Sostanj Thermal Power Plant: Slovenian Future?" (196 kb). The 3 page report in English language summarizing 26 posts published on-line. 16th of February 2010. Author: Umanotera.

Slovenia pilot use case deliverables

- Contribution no. 5 pdf Slovene use case pilot results for 2009 and piloting plan for 2010 (477 kb). 21th of December 2009.

- Contribution no. 4 pdf List of 47 web pages with links and information regarding Slovene use case (257 kb). 4th of August 2009.

- Contribution no. 3 pdf