Technocracy to democracy knowledge transfer using social media and reputation management

Abstract

Previous political sciences research has highlighted the importance of both ‘democracy’ (democratic processes and consultation with stakeholder groups) and ‘technocracy’ (specialized knowledge of experts) as main foundations for the development of effective public policies, and the need for balance as well as interaction between them. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for supporting this exchange can be highly beneficial. Our paper makes a contribution in this direction, by evaluating an ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method that has been developed for supporting the transfer of knowledge from ‘technocracy’ (i.e. knowledgeable experts) to ‘democracy’ (i.e. participants of the democratic processes, such as citizens’ representatives, elected officials and various public policies’ stakeholder groups). This method exploits policy-related content that has already been published by experts in numerous social media, adopting a selective approach (filtering this content in order to extract the highest quality parts of it that have been authored by the most knowledgeable experts) based on reputation management techniques. From the evaluation of this ICT-based ‘expert-sourcing’ method useful conclusions have been drawn concerning its strengths and weaknesses, as well as directions for the improvement of it and the enhancement of its value.