Presentation of Dr. Hannes Leo, CEO of Cbased Ltd, at CeDEM15 - International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2015

1. Evaluation of E-Participation
Efficiency with Biodiversity
Measures - The Case of the Digital
Agenda Vienna
John May, Hannes Leo, Alfred Taudes
CEDEM 2015

2. The context
How we started working on this paper?
My role in this endeavour?
The content of the presentation?

3. Digital Agenda Vienna: The process

4. DAW: digitaleagenda.wien

5. DAW: Basic Facts
171 ideas
372 participants
2451 votes
296 comments
Is this good or bad?
How to compare this process to others?

6. What is e-participation
Generates a flow of information from
participants to sponsor
How to measure effectiveness and efficiency of
eparticipation projects?
● Effectiveness: impact on what sponsor thinks, plans,
does
● Efficiency: extent of information flow from
participants to sponsor

7. An analogy from ecology
Community and diversity: Distinction between
mainland and island populations:
● Mainland population contains the full range of e-
participation topics/issues
● Island population (issues) have migrated from mainland
● A more efficient project will produce a greater flow of
issues

8. How to measure the flow?
Measure the # of issues in community = issue
richness (species richness)
Example: Project 1: 10 issues, 1 mentioned 91 times
Project 2: 10 issues, each mentioned 10 time
Issues richness = 10 in both cases
Flows (frequency distribution) are very
different
Ecologist use diversity indices to measure such
communities, e.g. Shannon entropy

9. Shannon entropy, effectic number of
species, ENI?
● Shannon entropy - 0.50, 2.30 for the above
examples - not very enlightening
● Can be easily transformed into a quantity
number called “effective number of species”
● John May renamed this “effective number of
issues” = 1.65, 10 = second project was
about 6 times as efficient (10/1.65)

10. Some minor technical details...
ENI: exp(H’), H´= - ∑px ln(px)
● H´=Shannon entropy
● px=relative frequency of each issue x
● ln(px)=natural logarithm of relative frequency
● ENI=raise the number ´e´to the power of the Shannon
entropy
Minimum=1 (single issue referendum)
maximum=no upper limit
Empirical sample of 70 projects: 150 rare

11. And? What is the score for the
DAW?

12. It´s so simple I replicated it for ODAP
Open-Data-Aktionsplan.de - an ongoing project
done for the German Ministry of the Interior and
the D21 Initiative
194 participants, 254 ideas, 2574 votes, 233
comments
The score is 189,9 - A new record!

13. Possible extensions and research
● Can be applied to any
participation/consultation/engagement method
that generates a frequency distribution
● Apply to closed questions, i.e. agree/disagree,
Likert scale, multiple choice…
● Build a knowledge base of e-participation
projects

14. And finally…
Thank you for attention!
You may check this out
● www.digitaleagenda.wien
● opendataaktionsplan.de
● discuto.io
● cbased.com
or get in touch: leo@cbased.com