The PADGETS project: Google engagement in Social Media based policy campaigns

It was a great pleasure to have a plenary meeting of the PADGETS research project at Google premises in Zurich, Switzerland. The PADGETS project develops a revolutionary platform for politicians and policy makers, allowing them to publish information, interact with citizens, monitor and analyse citizen opinion.

The padgets project is being implemented by a consortium of leading research centres (University of the Aegean, National Technical University of Athens, Fraunhofer FOKUS, ISMB, University Regensburg)  enterprises (Google, Whitehall Srl, ATC SA, Tech4i2) and administrations from Greece, Italy and Slovenia.

The PADGETS team at Google Zurich

Within the project, several new technologies are for the first time combined, tested and optimised in the electronic governace context, incuding:

• Web and Mobile Dashboards for implementing policy campaigns on-line, allowing for automatic communication with multiple Social Media platforms
• Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis of citizen interactions in blogs and social media, such as facebook, twitter, youtube. 
• Modelling and Simulation of citizen awareness, interest or involvement in public policy
• Visualisation of policy discussions, citizen interaction and trending.

PADGETS project includes one of the first applications of Google Chart Tools in policy visualisation.

Left: visualising tweets concernign a specific policy campaign using Google Map gadget.








Right: visualising different group interactions in Facebook, on a specific subject