Text analytics for democracy
The Obama transition team recently put up a web site, change.gov, that features several contact points for Americans to provide feedback directly to the future administration. One is called “Share Your Story” and another is “Share Your Vision”:
Share with us your concerns and hopes. – the policies you want to see carried out in the next four years.
There are also individual forms for each agenda item listed on the site. These are called “By the People, For the People.” For example, on the economy:
Tell us how the economy has affected you, what you’d like to see an Obama-Biden administration do, or where you’d like the country to go.
The other day, as a responsible citizen, I submitted a short idea about national service. In a conversation several days later with Matt Schwieger, we came upon the idea of using text mining techniques to sort through all the direct feedback given by citizens to change.gov…and eventually to the administration. There are not nearly enough underpaid public servants to go through all of these letters individually; but in aggregate, it’s a wonderfully rich source of data for an elected official seeking to understand the concerns of his or her constituents!
Just think about the possibilities:
- Sentiment analysis on individual Congressional bills, spending programs, Supreme Court nominees
- Geo-IP maps to cluster the concerns of the populace by state and county…and tailoring speeches accordingly
- Co-occurrence analysis combined with sentiment analysis to find out which specific parts of a bill or program are well-received, and which are unpopular
- Providing White House pollsters with a complementary stream of data with a much larger sample size
Assuming there was appropriate spam and duplicate detection, this is a way to have your voice heard, and make our democracy a little more direct. Send a positive note about something the government is doing that you like, and that bumps the needle up a little bit. Cuss them out, and that moves the needle back down. Transparent (well, except for the specifics of the models) and dead easy to do.
Obama won’t (and shouldn’t) make decisions based solely on public opinion, of course; but since his administration is already collecting the data, doesn’t it make sense to organize it intelligently and use it as an input to his decisions as president?
3 years ago