Designing a human computation framework to enhance citizen-government interaction

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 usage 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. Cit-izenpedia 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.