On the 12th of October the data-challenge Strengthen the Petition took place in Enschede. The goal of the challenge was to help strenghten the influence of petitioners. The data behind petities.nl was available for analysis. What can participants of the data-challenge learn from the data? What makes a petition successful and how can petitioners improve their petitions as to have a higher success rate in influencing policy.
Several groups worked with the data, looked for insights and interesting combination. After a day of work the results were pitched for a jury. The jury was interested in the impact of the ideas. The winner of the data-challenge succeeded in bridging a missing link. They used text-analysis, based upon artificial intelligence, to combine the petitions with government information like Open Council Data. By making this link you can follow if a petition has political impact. Is the petition part of the council meetings and the agenda? And is a council member using the petition as an argument for poltiical change?
The winning idea will receive a €2.500 research and development grant from the Ministry of Interior Affairs. An interview with the winner will later appear on the Dutch Open Government website.
