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"Traditional policy analysis approaches are characterized by a focus on system modeling and choosing among policy alternatives. While successful in many cases, this approach has been increasingly criticized for being technocratic and ignoring the behavioral and political dimensions of most policy processes. In recent decades, increased awareness of the multi-actor, multiple perspective, and poly-centric character of many policy processes has led to the development of a variety of different perspectives on the styles and roles of policy analysis, and to new analytical tools and approaches - for example, argumentative approaches, participative policy analysis, and negotiation support. As a result, the field has become multi-faceted and somewhat fragmented. Public Policy Analysis: New Developments acknowledges the variety of approaches and provides a synthesis of the traditional and new approaches to policy analysis. It provides an overview and typology of different types of policy analytic activities, characterizing them according to differences in character and leading values, and linking them to a variety of theoretical notions on policymaking. Thereby, it provides assistance to both end users and analysts in choosing an appropriate approach given a specific policy situation. By broadening the traditional approach and methods to include the analysis of actors and actor networks related to the policy issue at hand, it deepens the state of the art in certain areas. While the main focus of the book is on the cognitive dimensions of policy analysis, it also links the policy analysis process to the policymaking process, showing how to identify and involve all relevant stakeholders in the process, and how to create favorable conditions for use of the results of policy analytic efforts by the policy actors."

HDI Forum III: The Health Datapalooza promises to bring together a diverse group of data experts, technology developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, health care system leaders, CIOs, CTOs, and community advocates to support innovative applications of health and health care data. The Health Data Initiative (HDI), originally launched in 2010 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Community Health Data Initiative, is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health. The Forum will feature keynote addresses, an Apps Expo, demonstrations of new, cutting-edge apps, and thought-provoking panel discussions. There will also be plenty of time for networking and one-on-one interaction. It is a great opportunity to be in on the vanguard of data applications to improve health and health care. This year's event promises to be one you do not want to miss!

interesting case of data-intensive policy-making

PUBLISHED ON: Proceedings of the 22nd International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC) YEAR: 2011ISBN: 978-1-935056-08-9AUTHOR/s: Armenia, Stefano, Yannis Charalabidis, Diego Falsini, Fenareti Lampathaki, David Osimo and Katarzyna SzkutaREFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: Crossroads ProjectLINKS: http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/ DESCRIPTION: The role of Government has evolved over the last thirty years and while its role in service provision has diminished, its regulation activity is growing. The world has become increasingly interconnected, complex, and fast-evolving and the effects of individual behavior and policy choices are not predictable. The paradox is that while the amount of data available to governments has increased exponentially, yet policymakers clearly struggle to make sense of it so that during the last years, the European Commission has decided to invest heavily in research on this issue. In this paper, the authors report about their experience in the CROSSROAD Project, whose main goal was to build a roadmap in order to provide strategic directions for future research in the domain of "ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling". The roadmap, recently approved by European Commission, intends to be the basis for developing a shared vision, inspire collaborative and interdisciplinary research between academia, business, civil society and government, and provide support and orientation to policy-modeling also after the project end. In this context, the paper analyzes the Model-based Governance issue as the part of the roadmap that suggests the development of advanced tools for an efficient and effective decision-making process.

The potential for the Avian Flu (H5N1) virus to become a pandemic disease has mandated an examination of public health surveillance, response and containment strategies for developing countries. We have developed a Multi Agent System Simulation system known as IDESS (Infectious Disease Epidemic Simulation System) that rapidly constructs infectious disease models from existing data for any geographical region. This approach addresses an important area of infectious disease outbreak management, as it allows public health professionals to rapidly construct a simulation model for any geographic region and observe how an infectious disease spreads between communities. Such simulations will facilitate testing of containment strategies for rapid response.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive global survey of the policy process. Written by an outstanding line up of distinguished scholars and practitioners, the Handbook covers all aspects of the policy process including: Theory - from rational choice to the new institutionalism Frameworks - network theory, advocacy coalition and development models Key stages in the process - Formulation, implementation and evaluation Agenda setting and decision making The roles of key actors and institutions This is an invaluable resource for all scholars, graduate students and practitioners in public policy and policy analysis.

Agile development in public services

" Generate sales leads Campaign participants are high-conversion leads (potential customers) whom you can follow up with via emails. Receive customer insights Learn about the segments supporting each idea, including information about age, gender, education, occupation, city and interests Erdem Ovacik, Direktor Tine Wedell, Project Manager Cengiz Bayram, Technical Lead We serve clients internationally We are based in Copenhagen, and serve clients in Europe and abroad. Wedecide already support 6 languages. Wedecide platform is a Facebook application, where you ask specific questions to your audience, ans support your question with a video or slideshow.  Users develop ideas together and win points for being part of successful ideas. All of this is integrated with Facebook and Twitter with a slick UI.  Click here to check out the platform. "Using Wedecide, we engaged hundreds of Europeans to debate energy efficiency policies which resulted in dozens of valuable policy ideas. With this innovative method, we greatly improved the collaboration of our audience on policy proposals of the ALDE Party." Didrik de Schaetzen, Communications Director, ALDE Party Read our blog Call us: +45 26 37 29 96 Mail us: erdem [at] wedecide.com CVR: 33268394 "

After Masters of Networks, UNDP and INRIA work out a network analysis of World Bank contractors.

Many people go into open source software without careful consideration of what that means. This presentations tells it like it is from the point of view of a developer. Great visuals.

Blog about agent-based modeling applied to socioeconomic development

Forio simulations improve public policy development and implementation by allowing you to: *Model sophisticated behaviors by importing data and formulas from Excel, AnyLogic, and other programs. *Have global access to your Sim via popular web browsers. *Control access with secure user privileges. *Implement updates centrally, ensuring users have the most up-to-date information (preventing old or obselete info from being reused). *Operate worry-free, with dependable security and design measures. Customized simulations apps are easily accessible via standard web browsers, allowing users to easily make adjustments, share and compare results. With Forio's public policy simulations, users can create interactive online tools to generate, manipulate and illustrate "what if" scenarios that are ideal for long-term policy models.With Forio's public policy simulations, users can create interactive online tools to generate, manipulate and illustrate "what if" scenarios that are ideal for long-term policy models.

easy ready made tool to turn system dynamics models into playable games.

This article examines the foundations of gaming and related concepts, such as policy exercises and serious gaming, in a public policy making context. Examining the relevant publications in Simulation & Gaming since 1969, the author looks back at the development of gaming simulation for purposes such as public policy analysis and planning, and reviews the underlying theories and empirical evidence. The author highlights the recognition that the success of gaming for policy making derives largely from the unique power of that gaming to capture and integrate both the technical-physical and the social-political complexities of policy problems.

My view on the how, what and why of policy gaming.

The HYDRA integration architecture is an effort to develop a service-oriented architecture for integrated Web-based access of LANL agent-modeling capabilities. The work here includes both semantic and syntactic interoperability issues, optimization, computing performance, human machine interface design, and multi-scale, multi-model simulation and analysis software integration.

The Workshop on Argumentation Technology for Policy Deliberations will present the results of the European FP7 IMPACT Project, along with invited talks by leading developers and users of argumentation tools for supporting public participation in policy deliberations on the World-Wide-Web.

TITLE: SocialSYNC Launched by Syncapse and developed by Crimson Hexagon REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: LOCATION:US IMPLEMENTATION LEVEL:Deployed DESCRIPTION:SocialSYNC provides a powerful framework that pulls brands' unstructured social marketing data and content from third-party platforms and social media sites, and stores it in one managed, hosted and secure datacenter. This addition to the Syncapse Platform is designed to eliminate the data fragmentation that currently exists for brands as they ingest massive amounts of big data and content driven by disparate social applications. SocialSYNC allows global brands to compare campaign results from multiple channels side-by-side, and more accurately and effectively build a social data strategy linked to internal and external IT systems.

SentiStrength estimates the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts, even for informal language. It has human-level accuracy for short social web texts in English, except political texts. SentiStrength reports two sentiment strengths: -1 (not negative) to -5 (extremely negative) 1 (not positive) to 5 (extremely positive) It can also report binary (positive/negative), trinary (positive/negative/neutral) and single scale (-4 to +4) results. SentiStrength was originally developed for English and optimised for general short social web texts but can be easily configured for other languages and contexts by changing its input files - some variants are demonstrated below.