Mr. André R. Gouin, P.Eng. M.Sc.(EE), principal of EXIMEX Associates has agreed to support this project.
Resources that could be applied to this effort include the fields:
Systems Engineering
Telecommunications Networking
Software Engineering
Multimedia Imaging and Graphics
Artificial Intelligence
Collaborator Agents(1)
Machine Translation
Scientific and Technical Bilingual Terminology Acquisition and Creation
Small Business Accounting
Executive Assistance
03 | Description of the Proposed Project
Canadian citizens's dealing with the federal government is about to become more efficient with such bold initiatives as "Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology", "Access Canada", "Open Government Pilot" on the Internet (gopher, World-Wide Web). However, one missing factor is the aspect of consumer/taxpayer advocacy. Sending E-mail to governments and representatives will become easy, but the communication remains private. Exposing ideas in public on the electronic bulletin boards and USENET Newsgroups is already very popular, but there is no formal channel back to the source of the problems and opportunities.
A suggestion box is widely recognised in the private sector as a driving force for continuous improvement and innovation. It creates a win-win situation where the organisation benefits from the ideas and the originator receives an appropriate reward. Small complaints and criticisms, when exposed and debated on-line, would often turn out to be a tip of an iceberg of a much larger problem to be addressed and resolved at the root (witness the recent Intel Pentium floating-point bug). Even though no immediate action is taken, each suggestion gets stored in the depository of ideas.
The "Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre" project will try to change the paradigm and empower the citizens by giving them an ability to directly feed his/her idea to the proper authority through a single point of entry and hopefully influence the quality of life, regardless of different levels of governments, ministries, departments, agencies, programs, ...
For example, if somebody comes up with an idea that may lead to cost savings in the government operations, he/she fills out a WWW form or sends a formatted electronic mail in the Internet. When the message is received, the Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre will sort it out, find the category, assign urgency and importance (A-1, etc.) and re-direct it to the proper authority, using an inference engine and a knowledge base system (Figure 1).
There will always be a feedback to the originator, regardless of the response by the potential government beneficiary. All entries and responses will be kept and electronically published so that the records are available to the Auditors General's offices across the country as well as to the general public.
The system will help weed out "bugs of the society". There could be a built-in electronic voting mechanism to allow the significance of each idea to be judged by the general public rather than by the so-called "authority". Eventually, the concept would evolve into direct democracy with electronic petition, referenda, and even a virtual constitutional assembly.
Figure 01
04 | Contribution to CANARIE's Objectives
Area of Special Focus | Business
Although the access methods in today's business applications on the network are mostly based on dynamic hypertext links, they have static information content with limited search and retrieval capability, as seen in electronic publishing of catalogs, books and magazines through "Home Page" on the World-Wide Web site on the Internet, among others.
This pioneering project exploits the full potential of the information superhighway and focus on the use of artificial intelligence, knowledge base system and intelligent agent. The development of such network application will contribute to the Canadian economy through innovative service concept and uniquely broad social benefits. The commercialised services are ideal to be operated by small-sized enterprises.
05 | Target Market Description
Some means of expressing suggestions already exist. Fraser Institute, for example, has held "The Fraser Institute Prize for Economy in Government" contest. However, it has a panel of judges from the establishment and glorifies the winners by offering only a few awards to "winning" entries even though such winning ideas may not be implemented and many other "losing" cost saving ideas can be implemented.
A quick look at USENET Newsgroups (e.g., can.general) reveals a number of good and bad suggestions to better run the governments of Canada. However, each idea is often disorganised and there are many duplicate ideas. This project tries to make these ideas more structured and organised by offering financial incentives to the would-be contributors. The Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre would also be configured to monitor some of the USENET Newsgroups and semi-automatically enter the articles into the system. The concept can be extended to the private sector, acting as an on-line Consumer Reports.
For example, a citizen would like to write to his/her MP or MPP or MLA or MNA or mayor or regional councillor or city councillor, but has no idea how to contact the representative. He/she just fills out the form with "To whom it may concern" and sends it to the Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre, which sorts and categorises the idea and directs it to the appropriate office. The active subscriber of the service would receive a summary report after the messages were processed by the inference engine.
As in the private sector, a portion of the savings would be passed on to the originator of the idea if the cost savings result from the suggestion. The Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre would take a percentage commission, much as telephone companies share the profit with 1-900 number information providers.
Many government departments and agencies may have their internal suggestion box program, but the Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre would allow the ideas from government employees to be treated the same as the others. Thus, they would receive the same rewards as any other participating citizen, in a way analogous to the "Open Bidding Service" for government procurement of goods and services. The empowered citizens would no longer need lobbyists and special interest groups!
The U.S. White House is reportedly working on a system to automatically sort the flood of E-mail messages that they receive at "president@whitehouse.gov" and "vice-president@whitehouse.gov" addresses.
06 | Schedule
1995-10-01
start of the project
1995-12-01 | finalise the service concept
start of the project
1996-01-01
make hardware and software purchases
1996-02-01
establish network connection
1996-04-01
develop idea organisation and matching algorithm
1996-06-01
develop inference rule bases
1996-07-01
design World-Wide Web form in HTML format
1996-08-01
solicit governments for active participation
1996-09-01
integrate data base with inference rule base
1996-10-01
start of commercialised "Citizens Suggestions Processing Centre"
1997-03-31
end of the project
07 | Budget
Cost of the project
Labour .............................. $60 000 CAD
Direct Materials .................... $20 000 CAD
Special Purpose Equipment ........... $20 000 CAD (25 % maximum)
