Student Replys for the Discussion Board

Policy-making is driven by the need to solve societal problems and should result in interventions to solve these societal problems. Examples of societal problems are unemployment, pollution, water quality, safety, criminality, well-being, health, and immigration. Policy-making is an ongoing process in which issues are recognized as a problem, alternative courses of actions are formulated, policies are affected, implemented, executed, and evaluated. This process should not be viewed as linear as many interactions are necessary as well as interactions with all kind of stakeholders. In policy-making processes a vast amount of stakeholders are always involved, which makes policymaking complex. (Marijn Janssen, 2015)

Policy implementation is done by organizations other than those that formulated the policy. They often have to interpret the policy and have to make implementation decisions. Sometimes IT can block quick implementation as systems have to be changed. Although policy-making is the domain of the government, private organizations can be involved to some extent, in particular in the execution of policies. (Marijn Janssen, 2015)

The Availability of Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD)

Policy-making heavily depends on data about existing policies and situations to make decisions. Both public and private organizations are opening their data for use by others. Although information could be requested for in the past, governments have changed their strategy toward actively publishing open data in formats that are readily and easily accessible (for example, European_Commission 2003; Obama 2009). New applications and innovations can be based solely on open data, but often open data are enriched with data from other sources. As data can be generated and provided in huge amounts, specific needs for processing, curation, linking, visualization, and maintenance appear. The latter is often denoted with big data in which the value is generated by combining different datasets. Current advances in processing power and memory allows for the processing of a huge amount of data. BOLD allows for analyzing policies and the use of these data in models to better predict the effect of new policies. (Marijn Janssen, 2015)

Once all things are ready and decisions are made, policies need to be executed. During the execution small changes are typically made to fine tune the policy formulation, implementation decisions might be more difficult to realize, policies might bring other benefits than intended, execution costs might be higher and so on. Typically, execution is continually changing. Evaluation is part of the policy-making process as it is necessary to ensure that the policy-execution solved the initial societal problem. Policies might become obsolete, might not work, have unintended affects (like creating bureaucracy) or might lose its support among elected officials, or other alternatives might pop up that are better.(Marijn Janssen, 2015)

 

References

Marijn Janssen, M. A. (2015). Policy Practice and Digital Science. San Antonio: Springer.