Policy Informatics I

Policy Informatics I
• Policy: guideline that helps in attaining the aims,
goals and objectives of organisations. Show
directions to activities of organisations. It is a
product of political influence, determining and
setting limits to the actions of the state,
organisation, individuals or communities.
• Characteristics:  Flexible in execution, An effective
instrument for the execution, Defined clearly,
Reviewed periodically, Should follow established and
conventional procedure in normal circumstances.
• Public policy: State/gvnt, organisation, individuals
or communities takes a decision/chooses a course
of action to solve a social problem and adopts a
specific strategy for planning and implementation.
It’s a formal documented statement of intentions
and sets of actions of a government to either
remove certain deficiencies or improve the
conditions in any particular area of
concern/interest. It is embodied in constitutions,
legislative acts, and judicial decisions.
• Public policy theory: These theories including decision theory,
rational choice, game theory, public administration, data mining,
modelling and simulation, model validation, probability,
behavioural economics, organizational behavior, complex
adaptive systems, information visualization, human computer
interaction, and more.
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• Examples : Institutional theory (institutionalism ) • Rational
theory ; (rationalism) • Incremental theory ;(Incrementalism) •
Mixed scanning • Process theory • Group theory • Elite theory •
Game theory and • Public choice theory etc
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• Institutional theory • Public policy is determined by government institutions, which give policy
legitimacy. • Government universally applies policy to all citizens of society and monopolizes the
use of force in applying policy. • The legislature, executive and judicial branches of government
are examples of institutions that give policy legitimacy.
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• Rational theory • According to Hanekom(1987:82), rational comprehensive model has its roots in
the rational comprehensive decision making and implies that the policy maker has a full range of
policy options to choose from. • Rational theory is one that achieves maximum social
gain/benefit i.e. Government should choose policies resulting in gains to society that exceed
costs by greatest amount.
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• Problem definition
• Garbage-can model • The Garbage-Can Model emerged as a critique to the Rational Model
saying that organizations do not function as computers in solving optimization problems. • This
Theory advocates that organizations function like garbage cans into which a mix of problems and
possible solutions are poured, with the precise mix determining the decision outcome. 
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• Policy informatics: Policy informatics is the study of how
advances in computation, information and communication
technologies are leveraged to understand and address
complex policy and administrative problems and realize
innovations in governance processes and institutions. Use of
tools, models and simulations to help make policy choices,
solve problems and evaluate results of these policies.
• It exploit. information to tackle complex policy problems
and to ensure efficient and efficient policy setting and
implementation platforms.
 
• Policy informatics seeks to:
• enhance policy analysis and design through visualizing, modeling and simulating
complex policy scenarios,
• study the role of information systems and information-based governance
platforms in policy planning, deliberation, and implementation,
• advance the management of information systems projects in the public sector,
• study how information analysis and management influences the design of
participatory platforms, and
• arrive at theoretical and practical frameworks to advance our knowledge of the
roles of information analysis in policy setting, the use of computational
techniques in policy contexts and how information-driven policy setting
influences the nature of governance and governance platforms.

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• The goal of policy informatics is to find effective ways to use information and
computation to understand and tackle complex problems of society in terms
of policies.
• Tools: Textual analysis tool: E-petition on dataset where people express
their policy preferences whose signatures are collected via email/website.
People make casual inferences from e-petition data; e-petition system.
• Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Topic modelling: Information extraction
method. It identifies entities such a s people, locations, organisations and
products. It is divided into 2 phases: Entity detection and Entity typing
(Classification). Eg twitter as a micro blogging platform. Extracted data can
be displayed to users.
• Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA content analysis): Topic modelling algorithm
using e- petition data, used for content analysis extracting themes expressed
in content and is good for data exploration.
• Models: A model is an abstract and simplified representation
of a given reality. An agent-based model: agents performing
some kind of behaviour in a shared environment. They
perform tasks. (Intelligent and passive agents)
• Simulations: usage of a computational model in order to
improve the understanding of a system's behaviour and/or to
evaluate strategies for its operation, in explanatory or
predictive schemes. Meant to evaluate designs and plans
without actually bringing them into existence in the real world.