E-participation Tools in Science and Business Sphere ...

Procedia Computer Science Procedia Computer Science 101, 2016, Pages 398 – 406 YSC 2016. 5th International Young Scientist Conference on Computational Science

E-participation Tools in Science and Business Sphere Implementation: The Case of XPIR-Platform for Participation in Education Policy Lyudmila Vidiasova, Polina Kachurina, Sergey Ivanov1 and Graham Smith2 1

ITMO University, St.Petersburg, Russia [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] 2 Trobexis company, Georgia [email protected] Abstract The paper is focused on impacts appeared as a result of e-participation tools development. The authors paid attention to education and science sphere with the purpose to analyze how education policy could be formed relying on electronic interaction forms. A crowdsourcing platform XPIR has been selected as a research object. This platform gives an opportunity for prominent scientists, business and government authorities from the Ministry of Education and Science to interact and create new policy trends and projects. A complex of document analysis, web-site analytics, in-depth interviews with the portals’ holders provided an intensive analysis stressing the developmental factors and the critical impacts. The researchers used XPIR website traffic statistics and applied DBSCAN algorithm for clustering the selected features. The achieved data and clusters allowed us to make some conclusions about possible ways of forming the policy in a branch on the base of usage website. Keywords: E-participation, science, education, education policy, unsupervised learning, event detection

1 Introduction This paper introduces a practical case of an e-participation platform development and is aimed to discuss the social impacts appeared due to e-participation tools development. Usually this topic is connected with various studies of citizen’s participation in political life including e-votes, e-petitions etc. However, in today's realities this topic is much broader, and the possibility of new tools application in the link “State policy- Education and Science-Citizens-Business” gives a completely new opportunity for assessment the social impacts. In the current research the authors were focused on specific sphere- education policy regarding science and business communications. There were several reasons that proved the choice: 1. Quite a big scale. In accordance to the official statistic data (Russian Science in Numbers, 2015), there are more than 3500 scientific organizations in Russian, involving more than 720 thousand people working in this sphere. 2. Institutionalization process. Several state programs and initiatives have been applied in science& education sphere in recent years: Federal Target Scientific and Technical Program "Research and development on priority directions of science and civil engineering", “The project in improving the competitiveness of the leading Russian universities among the world's leading scientific and educational centers- 5-100” etc. These and other programs regulate the key interactions and set the priorities for development. 3. Massive investments in science. In Russia the legislative regulation of support for scientific funds, scientific-technical and innovative activity has been changed. From 2012 to 2015, the volume of financing funds established by the state increased almost 4 times. In 2015, the amount of public

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Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the scientific committee of the 5th International Young Scientist Conference on Computational Science © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2016.11.046

E-participation Tools in Science and Business Sphere Implementation:

Lyudmila Vidiasova et al.

funding has reached 28.3 billion rubles. Moreover, the investments in science and technologies will reach 2,5 -3% of the Russian GDP in 2020. This is an evidence of state support for the new science and education innovations. This paper makes a contribution by adding the framework of e-participation assessment on the base of mathematical modeling usage. The research idea was connected with using website traffic for evaluation the involvement in policy-making. The application of the proposed framework could be helpful for social and political scientists, public administrators, scientific and practice experts.

2 State of the Art We have looked at several contemporary examples of already established platforms for eparticipation in decision making. We found some examples of its effective use as well as several ones which were unsuccessful. Some of the government portals present very good cases of e-participation tools implementation. For instance, a web-site of UK Parliament (www.gov.uk) has more than 3000 topics on consultation (and 2900 already closed) and provides a special e-form available for every user. The famous portal “We the People” (Hagen et.al, 2015) establishes a dialogue with government. When the White House responds, everyone who has signed the petition will get an e-mail from the White House to let you know that we’ve reviewed and responded to the petition. A portal E-People in Korea (Suh et.al, 2010) integrates petitions, proposals, and policy discussions services and provides links to 303 governmental organizations responsible for its solutions. The aim is to increase participation. We can measure an impact of 3 mln active users of the portal. the e-People portal is claimed to have contributed to identify 3,534 complaints, make 48 recommendations and resolve 315 cases through settlement. My University in Europe (Cucurull et.al, 2013) fosters e-participation in European higher education institutions, allowing their members to influence the final decision making. The project revealed more effectiveness from bottom-up approach in e-participation development. The framework was deployed in 14 universities from Spain, Sweden, Bulgaria, France, Lithuania, Slovakia. More than 130 initiatives have been collected. Russian bank “Sberbank” crowdsourcing portal (http://smb.sberbank21.ru/sbercrowd) provides a collective decision- making with the purpose to create commercial services more comfortable for citizens. Public value creation in the bank itself (crowdsourcing platforms for the staff) and in communication with the clients. The project involved more than 100 thousand. people monthly. Community work resulted in more than 2.5 thousand ideas. Financial benefits. In the past year due to internal crowd sourcing technologies ("exchange of ideas") several billion rubles of net saving were obtained. At the same time there is a number of projects that have been found not successful. For instance, New Zealand Police Act Review (Lips et.al, 2010) took place in 2007. With the purpose to involve the widest layers of the population, the project organizers faced with the following problems: a lot of vandalism content has been published on a web-site and they could not handle with it by using moderation forces. Moreover, they were called upon printing all received feedback and advices, and a document flow was completely worsen. The case of Cambrian House Company (the first named as a crowd-sourcing firm) showed the necessity to think through all further steps of participations action. As it turned out, the “crowd” invented and estimated ideas perfectly, but showed less interest in the creative component. M.Usuf and colleagues (2014) studied a framework of e-participation in educational sector on the base of Grammar School in Hampshire UK and identified the factors which influenced on participation process: legal framework, political factor, educational issues, cultural, social and economic factors. The results of successful public participation projects made a significant impact on laws, bills, petitions, different projects implementation.

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We have summarized the above described examples and detected the following conditions which are necessary for e-participation project development: providing access to discussion of the target audience; correct formulation of the questions, proposal, any kind of text being published for public discussion; use competitive mechanisms to support the interest of the stakeholders; user-friendly and intuitive interface for the majority of potential experts, aimed at the collective construction of articles and the creation of a single final document ; impacts’ evaluation with further policy correction. From the prospects of revealing the successful conditions, we conducted a research on eparticipation practice in Russia focusing on available at the portals data and its implementation in the simulation model.

3 Research Methodology It is well-known that designers of educational systems and institutions have long believed that one of the key determinations of communication between them and social institutions are reports from the last. However, praise and blame, reward and punishment, have different effects on both learning and controlled development. System dynamics and new realities, stemming mostly from unprecedented development of technology and rapid changes in citizens perception, caused the demand of new dimension for building of such platforms of communication between various entities of innovation environment, which will leave much more possibility for mental wisdom, than before. With the aim to determine the impacts from e-participation tools’ implementation in science and business sphere, we analyzed the following spheres shaping the cycle of e-participation operation: - policy framework as an external impulse for e-participation collaboration in “state-educationbusiness” branch, - mechanisms for stakeholders’ involvement providing various opinions and attitudes to educational and research phenomena, - ways of e-participation presentation at the platform, - the level of demand to the platform. We have selected XPIR platform (http://xpir.fcntp.ru/) as a tool, having it structure, policies and tending to deliver e-participation mechanisms for interested stakeholders. XPIR was created in 2014 as a platform for expert scientists and entrepreneurs. The main purpose of the website is to help the prominent scientists, business and government to interact and to create new superior scientific, technical and social projects that are in the highest demand. The system itself consists of informational and interactive modules. Services providing some functional in a narrow direction could be also a logical part of the system. Xpir.Ru is oriented on building a collaborative network between scientist and different funding opportunities. It accumulates a database of scientific, research and innovation projects. Thus the system has 2 main categories of participants: scientists and entrepreneurs. The most interesting processes of interaction are discussions and expertise. For the research we have selected data for the period of June 2015- March 2016 detecting the activities on the platform, the number of visitors and new visitors. Web analytics on XPIR includes the following popular measurements: visits (or hits), visitors, page views (PV), new visitors, bounce rate, average page depth, and session duration. Basing these data we have built a model of automatic classification by the number of days of visits and average session duration. The achieved data and clusters allowed us to make some conclusions about the demand to the platform and its’ possible social impacts.

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4 Findings We started the research from the qualitative data of policy framework description and its’ interpretation. Then we followed with quantitative portal’s data and created a classification model on its base.

4.1 Policy Framework and Mechanisms for Stakeholders Involvement The Ministry of Education makes proliferating steps towards the dialog between the government and academicians, experts, innovation managers, entrepreneurs. After the document analysis of official Ministry’s documents (published at the official web-site http://xn--80abucjiibhv9a.xn--p1ai/) we have determined the following trends confirming the Ministries’ orientation to e-participation technologies: • •

• • • •

Experts Communities building as an important part of every direction in annual Public declaration of Russian Ministry of Education and Science; Public Ministry as a project aimed at improving the ministries’ efficiency including through the introduction of a system of open government data, increased accountability through the mechanisms of public and expert control over procurement and expenditure, public declarations of goals and objectives and their implementation reports; Working with electronic treatments coming in to the ministry (the answer according to the regulations within 30 days); Open data development for the target users (http://opendata.mon.gov.ru/); Discussion platforms development, including EDU.COWDEXPERT.RU, XPIR, http://club.mon.gov.ru/ etc.; live video broadcasting of the Ministry’s events.

We should underline the existence of the necessary policy framework which makes legal and legitimate e-participation use and development in various forms. At the same time from the published data the impacts of such ministry’s activities was not obvious. We have concentrated at XPIR platform trying to figure out the research tasks. The main goal of XPIR project is to create the instruments of commercialization of R&D activities in Russian universities. It is well-known, that nowadays governments try to make the shift of the focus of these social organizations from educational aspects, to the aspects of “expertise for sale”. In accordance with the policy framework determination we could establish the main purpose of XPIR as being a platform of information and analytical support for research and development. Despite the fact that R&D commercial focus is quite evident, the platform also appeared as a platform for communication, collaboration and conscious participation the n in R&D topics. Unfortunately, we could not found the clear plan for the stakeholders’ involvement as a unique strategic document within the whole policy framework. The popularization of a platform is now provided by many ways that are more usually in use by startups or innovative companies, but not educational organizations. This is a very new experience, quite appealing also is the approach: SMM for such projects is a rare tool, thus it makes targeting more effective. XPIR has its pages in social networks (Facebook, Vkontakte) and is promoted on different events. One of the logical steps of development is to promote it via universities intranet and to supply demands of some specific services (automated proofreading, grant search etc). The community of experts is being formed in two steps: 1) to form the profiles for experts based on linguistic analysis of documents of the experts (papers, patents, research projects); 2) to group experts from similar areas of expertise into Expert Hubs. The confirmation of an expert specialization is carried out by means of automatic collection of public and private data sources, including: • Federal experts register of the Ministry of Science and education,

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• • •

Data bases of Russian Scientific funds’ experts. Lists of the Higher Attestation Commission expert councils "Map of Science" –information system. List of destinations (knowledge areas), where there are publications and other research results. Fills scientist profile "Scientific activity and achievements." • LinkedIn, Research Gate, Google Scholar networks. The mechanisms of mutual evaluations and social competences are also used during the experts’ selection. This recommendation-based approach is widely used in famous LinkedIn network. All the projects sent to the expert assessment undergo linguistic analysis and according to its results are automatically referred to one of the Expert Hubs. By the present moment there have been designed 47 Expert Hubs in the Crowdsourcing Expertise Service. These hubs include more than 1500 experts. The service offers an opportunity to control the whole process of the crowdsourcing expertise, for example, it is possible to customize the visibility of the expertise, configure application forms and develop custom invitations.

4.2 E-participation Categories The ways of participation impression is presented by 3 main forms at XPIR platform: •

• •

E-discussions on specific topics related to science-education-innovation topics. This ways provides an opportunity to bring up a discussion, impress opinions and make dialogues between the interested parties. The discussions’ analysis showed that the main interest of platform participants was addressed to science project and publications issues (46%), the Ministry of Education and Science activities (21%), and funding opportunities (13%). Such topics as innovations and portals’ development resonated in no more than 8% of discussions. E- consultations present a collective question-board and answers to them. Currently, clarifications on projects’ development and intellectual property rights are the most popular among the participants. Each question gets up to 25 comments. E-expertise provides a competent assessment of project and scientific results, checks the level of scientific development, and also reveals the diversity of expert opinion. It is the most developed type of participation on the portal, the principle of crowd sourcing expertise is implemented for this purpose.

It is important to mention that crowdsourcing in Russia has become more and more widespread as a tool for thorough analysis and decision-making. Some businesspersons and government officers use it for co-creation (citycelebrity.ru), city development and solving some scientific tasks (CREN, text tagging). Government authorities also use crowdsourcing for public discussions of FASO (Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations) programs and legislative initiatives of Ministry of Communications. Crowdsourcing may help avoiding most of the problems, which nowadays affect decision-making process in research and technology area. The main problems include rigidness of group discussions which may lead to the lack of information and possible bias of analysis during the public discussion. In this situation, the main value of crowdsourcing is the ability to utilize the experience and competencies of many remote experts, while preserving the quality of analysis and validity of the results. Xpir.ru, the expert platform for scientists and entrepreneurs, which is supported by Ministry of Science and Education, has developed the Crowdsourcing Expertize Service in order to encourage users to contribute to decision-making in science and research area. The community of Xpir users consists of scientists, entrepreneurs, experts of various areas of expertise, government and large business representatives.

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Crowdsourcing expertise has many advantages in supporting the decision-making process in science and technology area in comparison with classical tools: The evaluation is always unique and relevant as data for the crowdsourcing expertise is collected only after the beginning of the expertise; Experts from leading scientific foundations such as Federal Targeted Program “Research and Development 2014-2020” and Federal Targeted Program “Education Development” provide scientific correctness of the evaluation; Experts in our service abide by rules and regulations and thus guarantee safety and confidentiality of the process. Crowdsourcing expertise on XPIR realized a combination of individual expert work on completing evaluation initiatives profiles with the institution of collective discussions on the site. XPIR Crowdsourcing Expertise Service provides not only with the tool but also with comprehensive support: fair expert community, project progress tracking and incentive system.

4.3 The Level of Demand and Model-Based Event Detection The comparison on XPIR data shows that statistically activities are dependent not only on social and political events, happening in the innovative environment, but as well on the activities of community’s opinion leaders. Comparing the data from platform’s statistic allowed to see that activities in discussions and faster changes in the news module (seasonal and based on the new funding opportunities for innovative projects) have a synergetic effect and raise also the time of page visit and the total time spent on the portal. Web analytics on XPIR includes the following popular measurements: visits (or hits), visitors, page views (PV), new visitors, bounce rate, average page depth, and session duration. All measurements are grouped by days for the period from June of 2015 to March of 2016. For the detection of significant events on the site, we have to select some relevant features for use in the model. The main idea is the simplification of the model and reducing overfitting risk by removing features with high similarity. From general considerations, we conclude that bounce rate may not be a significant feature for event detection. The remaining measurements are perhaps too similar, and their simultaneous use in one model is redundant. For feature selection, we performed a correlation analysis of all measurements. All the features may be divided into two classes with the high and low correlation between variables (see Fig. 1). All the depicted values are standardized by removing the mean and scaling to unit variance.

Figure 1: Features selection for event detection model (a) highly correlated, (b) lowly correlated features (correlation coefficient is denoted as r)

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Highly correlated featurees (see Fig. 1a). relate to visits, while new visitors and page depth are lowly correlated with other features and between each other (see Fig. 1b). Thesse relations between parameters are self-consistennt, but very high and very low correlations do not con nstitute a convenient basis for the multi-parameterr statistical model of user’s behavior. Initially we know the siggnificant difference in user activity on weekdays and weekends. Thereby, the first requirement to the model m is to correctly separate these periods. A noticeabble visual difference was observed in the figure with number of visits and session duration (see Fig. F 2). There is no apparent logical connection between b these features, and variations in values can bee caused by different reasons. In the model we don n’t use information about type of the day, allowing thee model to carry out automatic clusterization. Alll the outliers may be considered as special detected events and may be examined in more detail. We W have used a popular algorithm of unsupervised learning DBSCAN (Ester,1996) implemented inn scikit-learn software package (Pedregosa,2011), which is able to find separable clusters with nonlin nearity. The result of clusterization is shown in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: Autom matic clusterization of web data from XPIR with DBSCAN algorithm

In the results of automattic clusterization, we see a clear separation of weekkdays (working) and weekends, which is an indireect confirmation of the correctness of the model. Typpical weekdays have less number of visits with shoorter session duration. All the rest of data points canno ot be associated with one of the existing class and identified as untypical and should be related too special events or circumstances. After a deepeer analysis, we can find out three additional clusterss of event points in different places and with theeir specific shapes (higher page views or session durattions or both). They are highlighted with differeent colors using 2D alpha shape algorithm (Edelsbrrunner,1983). Some points seem atypical even forr these groups of events, and they are not covered by thhe shape. The following circumstannces have become the reasons for the detected untypicaal clusters: July 2015 (15/07) severall new active users came from social-networks and raissed relative issues of import-replacement, export of o IT products and solutions and technology transfer. November 2015 (15/11) - some changes in the funding schemes were applied,, so far the audience was seeking some informatioon about details. Also the new strategy of SMM wass accepted by XPIR and started to be implementedd.

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February and March 2016 (16/02- 16/03) - great infrastructural changes in the Russian ecosystem of innovations was made, this burst the forum into polemics and brought double amount of curious and sometimes talkative visitors. There was a drastic change in the structure of funding organizations, which lead to an attempt to unite the database of innovative projects. However, for several weeks it was hard to predict, what scenario the government would accept. Thus the interest groups were aware and extremely active in discussions. From the interviews with XPIR developers and evangelists we found out that evidence of values such as improving the quality of knowledge, will appear in cited foreign publication represented the results of research projects approved by XPIR e-expertise. The system itself uses Big Data and collects information on the citing, experience, image etc. Concluding this part, it is important to underline the uniqueness of social and cultural frames – an unprecedented combination of technological development, free social mind, high level of education and political and economic demand to move from resource-oriented economy to innovative and highly technological one. Shifting emphasis of the innovation policy away from the technology policy to social impact means a new stage of long-term cultural development and will probably be vested in the respect of the logic of knowledge creation.

5 Conclusion The conducted research made a contribution to the framework of e-participation assessment on the base of mathematical modeling usage. XPIR platform is a technical decision providing a wide range of methods and techniques for stakeholders to present their willingness, ideas, opinions and also serving as s support for decisionmaking process. During the research, we have identified the following trends of this e-participation platform development: - Political and strategic impact on the Ministry of Education and Science policy (this mechanism is declared but the results are waited in the next 1-2 years), creating services for optimization of investments in science (Nikitinsky et.al, 2015); - Community building with its’ opinion and marks representation (1500 experts at the first year of operation), - Enhancing the quality of scientific projects and publications through a high-qualified expertise. From the results of user’s activity on XPIR we found out a great progress in participation linked with community’s opinion leaders actions. The use of IT in organizations has made a substantial contribution to improvements in both the efficiency of resource management and the effectiveness of streamlining and transforming business processes. The case of XPIR platforms demonstrates an effective mechanism for building a collaboration between scientists, entrepreneurs and the funds on the business-process line. General news background and serious work of activists resulted in the fact that the platform has two different effects at once: image-formatting effect and social-shaping effect. Image-formatting is driven by the social psychological demand to show personal importance and intelligence. It may arrive from the norms of social behavior to even deviant perception of subjects and projections of this perception (Garfield, 1987). Social-shaping effect is closer to the social impact – step-by-step and discussion by discussion it forms a special community with differentiated values, but speaking “the same language”. In order to measure the influence of this community it is important to have a longer period of observation and correlation to social and political events. However even now it is possible to say that creation of such a platform joining business and academic people is very important and makes micro-investments in forming a new innovative cluster of technology transfer. The development of XPIR platform could be more successful in the field of social impacts’ translation in case of more

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active stakeholders’ involvement. From the research results we found that the majority of registrations have been made due to personal links and communications, but the current policy frameworks didn’t reflect well the involvement mechanisms support. However, even now we could see the prerequisites for social impacts formation which resulted in political, strategic, educational and social effects in various degrees. This research opens the prospects for future investigations in the field of data analytics and simulations focusing on gathering more personal data about users, data from the opinion polls and XPIR expertise’s results for the purpose of making the forecasts on e-participation tools influence on policy-making.

6 Acknowledgements This work was conducted with support of RFBR grant ʋ16-36-60035 “The research of social efficiency of e-participation portals in Russia”.

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