Introduction
Artificial intelligence is already having a big impact across domains, including government services. Users will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale, public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data, receiving responses comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, and infographics.
Recent advancements to artificial intelligence technology, e.g., large language models and GPT, 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, to better make sense of and interact with public-sector data.
Civic Technology and Open Government
According to Wikipedia, “civic technology enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.”
“Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.”
Award-winning Government Websites
Award-winning government websites include those of Mississippi (https://www.ms.gov), which provides a dialogue system on its front page, and Utah (https://www.utah.gov/), which provides live chat support.
Modernizing Government Websites and Services
There are opportunities to contribute to the modernization of other government websites and services, e.g., data.gov, performance.gov, and usaspending.gov.
Decision-support Scenarios
Important scenarios include, but are not limited to, providing decision-support for users preparing to vote and for users preparing to relocate to a new city.
In the first scenario, decision-support for voting preparation, users preparing to vote could review the public data of their cities, counties, states, and federal government.
In the second scenario, decision-support for relocating to a new city, users preparing to relocate could interact with data from multiple cities while comparing analytics and performance indicators of interest to them in their decision-making processes.
Multimodal conversational AI can enhance both of these scenarios.
Human-computer Interaction Concepts
Mobile and desktop computing scenarios involving both written and spoken conversational interaction with AI systems are of interest to the new group.
Scenarios involving the Web are of interest to the new group.
Multiple users could, together, speak with remote AI systems using smartphones or smart speaker devices while viewing AI systems’ responses in the form of streaming video content, visual analytics dashboards, displayed on connected smart televisions.
Conclusion
The new Civic Technology Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share information, to discuss these topics, to advance the state of the art, and to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group. Joining is fast, free, and easy to do.
Interested group participants are also invited to consider entering the group’s election processes to serve as Chairs.
The new group’s website is available at: https://www.w3.org/community/civics/ .
Thank you. Please consider forwarding this information to any others interested in these topics.