November 24, 2010

Governments listening to what you say, and how you feel

Image by williamcho via Flickr

In many countries you vote as a method of expressing your opinion on your leaders, and on certain key issues. In some countries surveys, ideation platforms, and other methods are used to understand opinions without the requirement of implementing changes, simply as a tool to hear what citizens are thinking.

Singapore, however, is launching an effort to mine sentiment from social media, using tools developed by IBM.

This will enable the government of Singapore to gain a deeper understanding of how people feel about various topics through passive listening. Of course, it is important to remember that automated sentiment analysis is imperfect, but so too are manual surveys. It is also important to fully understand the demographic being monitored as it may not represent the right cross-section of citizens, and manual surveys may still be required.

However, it’s a good first step and certainly something that, balanced with other solutions, should help governments better understand how citizens feel about key issues.

John F. Moore

Government in the Lab

This entry was posted in All Posts, JohnFMoore and tagged in Asia, gov20, Government, IBM, innovation, Sentiment analysis, Singapore, Singapore Government, Social Conversation Monitoring, social media.