A new roadmap for next-generation policy-making

In the last thirty years the role of the government has moved consistently away from services provision to regulation. Society and economy has become more interconnected, unstable and unpredictable than ever, and citizens are keener to engage in complex policy making. Within this context, traditional tools for policy making, based upon the perfectly rational representative agent maximizing its own utility in a general equilibrium framework, have been demonstrated to be unable to predict and cope with some of today's most pressing challenges, such as the financial crisis and climate change. Despite the explosion of data availability, the possibility to analyse them through crowdsourcing and large scale collaboration, the advance in modelling and simulation tools for assessing non-linear impact of policy options, the full potential offered by the new instruments for policy making has yet to be achieved. Therefore policy makers have not yet at their disposal a set of instruments able to cope with the needs stemming from their decision making activities. In order to meet those needs the project CROSSOVER "Bridging Communities for Next Generation Policy-Making" is elaborating a demand/driven "International Research Roadmap on ICT tools for Governance and Policy Modelling", which links the needs and the activities of policy-making with current and future research challenges. Copyright 2012 ACM.