International Journal of Public Information Systems

Policy making is a complex activity since it involves striking a balance between legal requirements, intended outcomes, the limits of scientific knowledge at any given time, and the public response to the policy. Whilst incorporating popular input into the process is crucial to the legitimacy and acceptability of the outcome, it is also desirable to match citizen’s expectations and demands to the policy.

Questions of great concern for policy makers then become how to base policy on the existing knowledge base? How to trust the sufficiency of data, its complexity and representation, as well as what extent the impact of a policy can be predicted before it is implemented? The full impact of policy decisions is not always obvious at the time the policy is formulated or enacted, and any short-comings of the policy become known when it is too late to change it. In this stage, policy makers and analysts alike wrestle with how to intelligently filter information according to relevance, relationship and provenance.

Editors: Aron Larsson, Mid Sweden University and Somya Joshi, Stockholm University