Innovating Good Regulatory Practice using Mixed-Initiative Social Media Analytics and Visualization

Greater availability of data - so called big data - presents new opportunities to apply innovative analytic approaches and new technologies to better understand development strategies and outcomes in relation to Good Regulatory Practice. This paper discusses the opportunity to train and use more data-driven approaches facilitated by visualization, interactivity and data science methods to innovate rule making and the way governments engage in dialogue with citizens on regulatory reforms. The paper focuses on two areas in particular - 1) regulatory impact assessment (RIA) and 2) information processing support in notice and comment on rulemaking - with particular reference to how the application of a novel big data analytics framework, Mixed-Initiative Social Media Analytics (MISMA), can be used to address these two rulemaking challenges.