Using Sandboxes for Testing Decisions in the Public Sector

Abstract

Technological advances are increasingly influencing how the public sector makes decisions according to citizens’ needs and the community’s problems. The need for a solution that facilitates the fast adaptation of administration to social context and people’s feedback becomes mandatory in order to ensure better services and implement projects that are in concordance with needs. In this paper, we propose a sandbox solution that helps public administration better understand community problems in real time, allocate public money more effectively to projects that really matter, and assess the administration’s performance. We started by collecting, filtering and analyzing social platforms posts and comments for 95 municipalities, and we extracted both the impressions/sentiment, but also the real problems that the communities are facing. Also, we categorized all cities depending on population, geographical area, and historical area to better identify common problems and create clusters of topics based on this split. We identified the most common issues communities face and integrated all the information into a sandbox that can be easily used by local administration for reactive decision-making and by central administration to provide a better overview of how public money is spent and whether the decisions align with needs. The results show that there is a real need for a sandbox to bring more clarity to the central and local administration layers and also better connect administrations with the people.