Designing a Human Computation Framework to Enhance Citizen-Government Interaction

• Published in: J.UCS (Annual print and CD-ROM archive ed.) 2019-01, Vol.25 (2), p.122-153
• Main Authors: Zabaleta, Koldo, Lopez-Novoa, Unai, Pretel, Ivan, López-De-Ipiña, Diego, Cartelli, Vincenzo, Modica, Giuseppe Di, Tomarchio, Orazio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: e-government; human computation; human-computer in
• ISSN: 0948-695X; 0948-6968
• DOI: 10.3217/jucs-025-02-0122

Human computation or Human-based computation (HBC) is a paradigm that considers the design and analysis of information processing systems in which humans participate as computational agents performing small tasks and being orchestrated by a computer system. In particular, humans perform small pieces of work and a computer system is in charge of orchestrating their results. In this work, we want to exploit this potential to improve the take-up of e-service United States of Americage by citizens interacting with governments. To that end, we propose Citizenpedia, a human computation framework aimed at fostering citizen's involvement in the public administration. Citizenpedia is presented as a web application with two main components: the Question Answering Engine, where citizens and civil servants can post and solve doubts about e-services and public administration, and the Collaborative Procedure Designer, where citizens can collaborate with civil servants in the definition and improvement of new administrative procedures and e-services. In this work, we present the design and prototype of Citizenpedia and two evaluation studies conducted: the first one, a set of on-line surveys about the component's design, and the second one, a face-to-face user evaluation of the prototype. These evaluations showed us that the participants of the tests found the platform attractive, and pointed out several improvement suggestions regarding user experience of e-services.