Artificial Intelligence, Open Government, and Civic Technology

[Adam Sobieski]

Artificial intelligence, specifically multimodal dialogue systems and chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT), can provide people with new user interfaces and user experiences with which to more conveniently access, navigate, and make sense of bulk open government data.

AI-enhanced access to open government financial, accounting, and budgetary data can equip: (1) accountants, auditors, analysts, comptrollers, public officials, legislators, oversight committees, and members of their staffs, and (2) the public, journalists, and government watchdog organizations.

Multimodal dialogue systems and chatbots can provide responses to questions comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, infographics, and tables.

With respect to citizens' utilizations of these AI-enhanced systems, scenarios to consider include, but are not limited to, providing decision support for: (1) preparing to vote, where data from one city, county, state, and federal government might be accessed, and (2) preparing to move, where data from multiple locations might be accessed and compared.

I am pleased to announce the formation of a new group for discussing, exploring, and advancing the state of the art with respect to these and other related topics: the Civic Technology Community Group (https://www.w3.org/community/civics/ , https://www.w3.org/community/civics/2023/04/11/about/).

I would like to invite you, those here, to consider joining the new group and I welcome you to spread the word to any interested others.

  

 

Best regards,

Adam Sobieski