Positiv Spaces (+Spaces) aims to provide novel technologies and instruments that will allow government bodies to measure public opinion on a large scale and seize the outcomes of prospective policy measures by leveraging the power of the communities. From the +Spaces perspective, Virtual Spaces (VS) form a vast reserve of group knowledge that, once aggregated and properly processed, can be incorporated in the policy making process.Currently, government agencies seek to refine their policy making process by assessing the impact of prospective policies to the society prior to their implementation. Traditional tools for this include polls and forums, but these have limited capabilities and are inadequate for purpose variety of reasons. +Spaces aims to address this issue by using VSs as testbeds for policy simulation. Contemporary VSs can be viewed as micro-societies with dynamics resembling those of real world societies, the most evolved having virtual economies as well as regulations analogous to a legislative framework. Moreover, VSs are controlled environments in which all parameters of users’ reactions and interactions can be tracked. +Spaces will provide governments with tools for testing their legislation in a number of virtual environments as well as data mining tools for tracking the users’ reactions. We will develop technologies for aggregating, filtering and analyzing this information, as well as recommender and reputation systems that will ensure that only reliable sources of data are taken into account. Finally we will represent this information in an appropriate fashion that will enable government bodies to draw conclusions on the potential outcomes of the policies they propose, taking into account the analogies between VS and real life concepts. We believe that the +Spaces platform will constitute a powerful tool for testing policies and forecasting their impact and will assist government bodies to include the public opinion in the policy making process.
+Spaces: Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces
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