Citizenpedia: A human computation framework for the e-government domain

Human computation relies on crowds of people to perform large workloads, and in this work, we want to exploit this potential to improve the experience of e-government and the use of e-services. To that end we present the Citizenpedia, a human computation framework aimed at fostering citizens involvement in the public administration. The Citizenpedia is presented as a web application with two main tools: 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 several contributions: first, the design of the Citizenpedia concept, and then, its evaluation through a set of online surveys that were filled by 152 citizens and 63 civil servants from three different countries. The surveys served to successfully validate our design, and also to provide feedback on new features that were not taken into account in the first place. We finally present the software architecture of the Citizenpedia and provide the link to its source code.