Policy-making in a Complex World: Can Visual Analytics Help?

As government are moving their focus from service provision to regulation, socio-economic issue are revealing more complex than ever to regulate. Traditional top-down and linear models for dealing with risks proved uneffective, as the financial crisis has shown. In recent years, new ICT tools have emerged that take better account of complexity and wicked problems, namely by augmenting human intelligence rather than trying to substitute for it: for example, social networking, crowdsourcing, social simulation and visual analytics. Yet these tools are far from being widespread and the related research fields are still fragmented. The CROSSROAD project, co-funded by the European Commission, aims at drawing a common research agenda in the field of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling, including approaches such as visual analytics, that enable the identification of unexpected risks and the augmenting of human intelligence in dealing with large amounts of data. This paper presents the approach and the first results of the project, with the aim to start a wider discussion with the visual analytics community on future research issues.