LIST OF PANELS

The environment in which public policy is made has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means both citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. Policy-making therefore takes place in an increasingly rich data environment, which poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. Recent years have seen increasing attention on how big data approaches can uncover patterns of human behaviour and help predict social trends; the insights gained from transactional information can also be used to drive evidence-based policy making and ‘nudge’ political behaviour. But governments have lagged behind other sectors in exploiting the potential of big data to inform public policy, and face a number of ethical and logistical challenges in doing so. This panel calls for papers that explore the new research and public policy frontiers opened up by big data, aiming to serve as a forum to encourage discussion across disciplinary boundaries on how to exploit big data to inform policy debates. We welcome papers reporting on innovative research exploiting large datasets or applying novel methodological tools (from experiments, to crowd-sourcing, to online ethnography) aimed to overcome the limitations of big data; papers that report empirical results and employ policy analysis approaches that would not have been possible without access to digital data; papers that further methodological development in data science; case studies of data-driven policy initiatives such as open data or big data programmes, or crowdsourcing platforms; papers that investigate the ethical and moral dilemmas provoked by data science methods and big data approaches; papers that incorporate expertise from more than one academic discipline. Applicants will have the opportunity to co-submit their paper to the journal Policy and Internet, which will operate a fast-track review process for accepted papers.

The environment in which public policy is made has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means both citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. Policy-making therefore takes place in an increasingly rich data environment, which poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. On the promise side, such data offers a chance for policy-making and implementation to be more citizen-focused, taking account of citizens’ needs, preferences and actual experience of public services, as recorded on social media platforms. As citizens express policy opinions on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook; rate or rank services or agencies on government applications such as NHS Choices; or enter discussions on the burgeoning range of social enterprise and NGO sites, such as Mumsnet, 38 degrees and patientopinion.org, they generate a whole range of data that government agencies might harvest to good use. Policy-makers also have access to a huge range of data on citizens’ actual behaviour, as recorded digitally whenever citizens interact with government administration or undertake some act of civic engagement, such as signing a petition.   Data mined from social media or administrative operations in this way also provide a range of new data which can enable government agencies to monitor – and improve – their own performance, for example through log usage data of their own electronic presence or transactions recorded on internal information systems, which are increasingly interlinked. And they can use data from social media for self-improvement, by understanding what people are saying about government, and which policies, services or providers are attracting negative opinions and complaints, enabling identification of a failing school, hospital or contractor, for example. However, big data is technologically challenging for government. Governments have long suffered from information technology skill shortages and the complex skill sets required for big data analytics - what is increasingly labelled 'data science' - pose a particularly acute challenge, requiring expertise from multiple fields. Academic researchers focusing on policy are also challenged, as data science facilitates and even requires modelling techniques and expertise from multiple disciplinary fields, including the physical and life sciences as well as the social sciences. Big data also presents ethical challenges to policy makers, particular in terms of privacy when personal data is involved, and new moral dilemmas when new policy options become available. For example, it is possible to carry out probabilistic policy-making, where policy is made on the basis of what a small segment of individuals will probably do, rather than what they have done. Predictive policing has already had some success, but can lead to a “feedback loop of injustice” as policing resources are targeted at increasingly small socio-economic groups. Such challenges are greater for governments than corporations, but policy-makers have no choice but to tackle them. This panel will investigate both the potential of big data and data science for policy-making - and the logistical and ethical challenges that they pose to both policy-makers and academic policy researchers.