policymaking20

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?

In a government bureaucracy, any innovation can take years to come to fruition. But that can change, says Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy for the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Kalil recently participated in a two-day conference at Wharton titled, "For the Win: Serious Gamification," which looked at the application of gaming techniques in business, education, government and other scenarios. Before the conference, Kalil spoke with Kevin Werbach, a conference organizer and a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, about why gamification has become a hot topic at the White House.

PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject 'poverty' and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path. PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room. The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty

Automatic analysis of news related to food security issues in French language media (national and local). Text-mining network analysis tools are used to identify the key themes discussed in the press at a given period.

Access, visualize, mashup and discover actionable insights hidden in Big Data & Extreme Information.

"An Evidence Hub is designed to help your members add their insights where they'll make the highest impact, and through the use of different visualizations/maps, helps answer questions such as the following: Who in my region is working on this problem? Are there any partnerships between projects in these two areas, on this theme?"

Approved March 2012

"...we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you're not into programming, you'll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code."

"Agenda digitale: la Cabina di Regia avvia 'consultazione social' per contribuire ai lavori dell'Agenda Digitale Italiana. I risultati della prima settimana Dal 26 aprile al 1° maggio, la piattaforma ha avuto quasi 5000 accessi, con 3700 visitatori unici, il 9% dei quali da dispositivi mobili. "

PUBLISHED ON: Proceedings of the 26th International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC) YEAR: 2008 ISBN: 978-1-935056-01-0 AUTHOR/s: Armenia, Perugia, Roma REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: digitPA LINKS: http://www.digitpa.gov.it/ USED TOOL: Powersim DESCRIPTION: This study deals with a System Dynamics analysis of the paper dematerialization problem during the transition to an all-digital society. The efforts are focused on the description of the situation in terms of the relationships between systemic variables that define the underlying structure of the problem. The referring context is the Italian Public Administration. The central spots of the analysis are the diffusion of the "new technology" and the problem of the archives' dimensions, which have been formalized, by means of the creation and the study of a casual loop diagram, into a dynamical hypothesis. The systemic approach that we used through the whole study, allowed us to consider many collateral aspects that are crucial in this issue, and provide a rich analysis that also shows how social and psychological factors may in the end determine policy resistance and great obstacles to organizational change.

PUBLISHED ON: Proceedings of the 22nd International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC) YEAR: 2004 ISBN: 0-9745329-0-8 AUTHOR/s: Armenia, Onori et al.- REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: Armenia, Onori USED TOOL: POWERSIM DESCRIPTION: The implementation of specific management control/decision support systems, based on System Dynamics models, allow first for a better learning of the environmental dynamics which influence the economic behavior of the firm, and second, for a deep understanding of the results of the decisional policies which the Chemist himself, together with his collaborating staff, may choose among a plethora of strategic choices. By ignoring that "structure influences behavior", all the actions, even the ones deemed most brilliant, may have a very different result if the very nature of the environment is not clear. A system dynamics approach has helped identifying those modeling and conflict resolution policies which may help in conducting a group model building session, towards the sharing of a common mental model and the collegiality of decisions which, in the long run, may bring economic success to the Chemist's business.

YEAR: 2010 ISSN: 1996-1073 AUTHOR/s: Bassi REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: Millennium Institute LINKS: http://www.millennium-institute.org/ DESCRIPTION: With the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 national leaders have startedinvestigating options for reducing carbon emissions within national borders. Despiteconfronting similar energy issues, every country that adopted the Kyoto Protocol has aunique energy strategy -being characterized by a different context, social, economicor environmental that influences the way different nations deal with climate change andother energy-related issues. Finding that currently available energy models are often toodetailed or narrowly focused to inform longer-term policy formulation and evaluation holistically, the present study proposes the utilization of an integrated cross-sectoralmedium to longer-term research and modeling approach, incorporating variousmethodologies to minimize exogenous assumptions and endogenously represent the keydrivers of the system analyzed. The framework proposed includes feedback, delays andnon-linearity and focuses on structure, scenarios and policies, requires a profoundcustomization of the model that goes beyond a new parameterization. The inclusion of social and environmental factors, in addition to economic ones, all unique to thegeographical area analyzed, allows for a wider analysis of the implication of policies byidentifying potential side effect or longer-term bottlenecks for socio-economicdevelopment and environmental preservation arising from cross-sectoral relations.

REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: XJ-Technologies LINKS: http://www.xjtek.com/ DESCRIPTION: AnyLogic is the only tool that supports all the most common simulation methodologies in place today: System Dynamics, Process-centric (AKA Discrete Event), and Agent Based Modeling. The unique flexibility of the modeling language enables the user to capture the complexity and heterogeneity of business, economic and social systems to any desired level of detail. AnyLogic's graphical interface, tools, and library objects allow you to quickly model diverse areas such as manufacturing and logistics, business processes, human resources, consumer and patient behavior. The object-oriented model design paradigm supported by AnyLogic provides for modular, hierarchical, and incremental construction of large models.

Access paper here: http://www.albany.edu/~gpr/SmallModels.pdf

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 Cyberinfrastructure Shell (CIShell) is an open source, community-driven platform for the integration, utilization and visualization of datasets, algorithms, tools, and computing resources. CIShell supports the plug-and-play of datasets and algorithms and their bundling into custom tools including Network Workbench, TexTrend, Sci² and EpiC.