Aiding and Automating the Analysis of Public Comments and Consultations

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. Previously, we discussed how AI could simplify the analysis of public comments, e.g., for proposed regulations and laws, or other consultations with stakeholders and/or the public.

In these regards, here is a new and related project: https://ai.gov.uk/projects/consult/ .

"Public consultations are a critical part of the process of making laws, but analysing consultation responses is complex and very time consuming. The government runs 700-800 consultations a year on matters of importance to the public. Some are very small, but a large consultation might attract hundreds of thousands of written responses.

"A consultation attracting 30,000 responses requires a team of around 25 analysts for 3 months to analyse the data and write the report. And it’s not unheard of to get double that number. If we can apply automation in a way that is fair, effective and accountable, and surround this with good software that puts the policy analyst and decision maker at the center, we could save most of that time and money, and develop more informed policies.

"Working with the No10 data science team (10DS), the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) is developing a tool to make the process of analysing public responses to government consultations faster and fairer.

"The Consult tool uses AI and data science techniques to automatically extract patterns and themes from the responses, and turns them into dashboards for policy makers.

"The goal is for computers to do what they are best at: finding patterns and analysing large amounts of data. That means humans are free to do the work of understanding those patterns."


Best regards,
Adam