Abstract

In this thesis, we explore the use of social media in assisting in decision making and present a case study of the development and implementation of an open data framework in a small organization.
We analyze the role of social media data for providing policy insight and prioritization of initiatives among citizens in particular we explore the sentiment analysis application in data mining in twitter. Data related to poverty and basic income was collected for 24 days in 2019, cleaned and prepared for natural language processing. A subset of the data was manually labeled for sentiment analysis in order to inform and train the AI. This analysis of public opinion on poverty is situated within the sustainable development goals and support for poverty reduction policies.
We also explore the case of study of the district of Squamish in the development and application of an open data framework aligned to the strategic values and with a look into the continuous improvement and correct documentation of the system. We develop a policy, guidelines and framework tailored to this organization with small communities in mind.
We use the open data case of study of Squamish as a model for the framework, we feed the framework with information based on the strategic direction and meeting with the district working group to better direct the development and application.
We finally explore a joint solution for the progress of equality policies and targeted governmental initiatives while exploring the interactions of external and internal stakeholders. We present the social media case as a component to support the overall framework and to empower citizen with valuable data and potential for information analysis for other stakeholders.