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The Political Innovation project is asking "why does politics still need to be done this way?" Starting with a series of 'Translation Layer' events in early 2012, we will be looking at the future of policymaking in general and think-tanks in particular.

smartvote is a so-called online voting advice application (VAA). Based on a comprehensive questionnaire on political issues it compares the political positions of voters with those of political parties and candidates. Voters receive a voting advise in form of a position-matching. smartvote exists since 2003. Developper and operater is the non profit organization Politools. During the electoral campaign of the 2011 national elections smartvote was used more than 1.2 million times.

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.

"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."

Play to be Mario Draghi, form the ECB web site, and learn economics and politics.

The interconnectedness of the global economy makes it more vulnerable to major shocks. In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, global leaders are acutely aware of the threats another such crisis would pose to economic recovery, social cohesion and political stability. How can governments and business prepare for and respond to such unanticipated events?

Eli Pariser explores how ideas move in the networked economy. As the board president of MoveOn.org, he pioneered many practices of online organizing. Now, Pariser is focused on the social and political impact of the personalized web, examining the role that filters - both cognitive and software-based - have in shaping what information spreads, which he refers to as the Filter Bubble .

About the project The USA Today/ Twitter Election meter is a graphic representation of the Twitter Political Index, a daily number produced by Twitter in partnership with Topsy labs and polling firms The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.

An interesting look at how a political campaign tried and failed to use big data and web technologies to help reach and get out their supporters. Additional reporting at: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/orca-was-no-fail-whale-says-romneys-digital-director/ and http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/

I think it is important to remember that at the end of the day, policy is about influencing people. Influence often isn't found persuasive arguments or rhetoric, instead it can be found in the smallest of word choices and cues.

YourView aspires to give Australians a stronger democratic voice. It has the unique ambition to present what we really think about major public issues, and giving that collective wisdom a role in the national political discourse. By "what we really think" we mean the considered collective viewpoint - ideally what Australians as a whole would think if they were better informed about major public issues and if they had more time to reflect and deliberate about those issues. YourView's aims are thus consistent with those of the deliberative democracy movement.

A serious gama to improve economic participation of citizens.

An anthology of essays from the McKinsey Center for Government (written by political leaders, civil servants, economists and policy experts) exploring the approaches that governments around the world are taking to common, emerging problems.

Statistics and tools to decide.

Debatepedia is the Wikipedia of debates - an encyclopedia of pro and con arguments and quotes on critical issues. A project of the 501c3 non-profit International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Debatepedia utilizes the same wiki technology powering Wikipedia to centralize arguments and quotes found in editorials, op-eds, political statements, and books into comprehensive pro/con articles. This helps citizens and decision-makers better deliberate on the world's most important questions. Debatepedia is endorsed by the National Forensic League.

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.

Austria , Germany , Greece , Switzerland , United Kingdom Type of initiative Project or service Case Abstract NOMAD aims to introduce the experience of setting a political agenda in a non-moderated, crowd sourcing way, by providing decision-makers with automated solutions for content search, acquisition, analysis and visualisation, while gathering online information from social media, blogs, news feeds and the web, following upon complex sets of issues.

What people think about politics through what they read. Unfortunately, only for the US, but quite interesting. It looks by reading material, that the Democrats will have a hard time this November.