A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE

CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION

V. M. R. Penichet, M. Tobarra, M. D. Lozano, J. A. Gallud and F. Montero

LoUISE Research Group – Computer Science Research Institute (I3A)

Castilla-La Mancha University, 02071 Albacete, Spain

Keywords: Workflow, e-administration, procedures, information sharing, collaboration, communication, intelligent

agents.

Abstract: One of the public administration dreams is to improve the quality of service and the simplification of

procedures and tasks. Administrative procedures in town councils, intelligent agents, workflow processes

and Web-based computing are some issues which can be mixed to get a user-oriented system able to support

feedback between citizens and their Town Council. Notifications by means of e-mails and messages in

user’s intranet facilitate user-to-civil servant and system-to-user communication and collaboration. In this

paper, a Complaints and Suggestions Web-Based Collaborative Procedure (CS-WCP) is presented as an

advanced e-administration solution. All the administrative procedure steps are well analyzed by workflow

modelling, and then every task is coordinated. Intelligent agents allow performing some tasks, which used

to be done in a manual manner, in an automatic way. This system allows people with different cultures,

religions, knowledge, nature and necessities to interact with the local administration in an easy and intuitive

way.

1 INTRODUCTION

A Town-Council is a sophisticated world of

relationships in which citizens, politicians, civil

servants and companies coexist all working together

supporting the wellness of the community.

Nowadays, public administration is necessarily

electronic. The term e-administration belongs to the

nineties, thanks to the technology age.

Technology was born to help people in their

lives. Everywhere, at every place, there are

computers which solve problems efficiently,

effectively, and quickly in daily work. There are a

lot of things that software can do to improve

people’s work. Two of these things are: (1) on the

one hand, people can access software systems from

anywhere and anytime through the Internet. And on

the other hand, (2) information can be processed in

an ordered way.

Nowadays, the most important richness is data.

A correct processing of this information, a well

structured storage, interrelations between related

concepts, etc. are important issues. By means of

collaborative web-based systems, information is

supported in the best way.

CSCW (Greif, 88)(Grudin, 94) and Groupware

(Johnson-Lenz, 81) as the technology supporting

CSCW research field arise to solve the necessities of

a group of very different people.

In our opinion, town councils are places where

this kind of software could help to coordinate civil

servants, to facilitate the communication between

each other, and also to allow collaboration among

them. This is not only good for an internal use, but

also for coordinating, communicating, and

collaborating with citizens.

Regarding the daily work in a Town Hall,

citizens need to express what they think, and town

councils need to know what their citizens think in

order to improve their services.

Lots of administrative procedures are processed

every day in administrative units of the town

councils, most of them initiated by citizens. The

worst thing is that many administrative procedures

are nowadays still being processed in a manual

manner. As procedures are initiated using non

electronic request forms, information is finally not

stored in databases but only on physical archives –a

lot of useless papers and other material documents

are generated. This way information is untidy and

308

M. R. Penichet V., Tobarra M., D. Lozano M., A. Gallud J. and Montero F. (2008).

A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 308-315

DOI: 10.5220/0001723103080315

 SciTePress

Figure 1: Chart of the main process.

unconnected. These are some problems which arise

when data and procedures are not electronically

handled.

In this paper we introduce an electronic

administrative procedure which takes into account

collaboration, communication, as well as worker-to-

worker (w2w) and Administration-to-citizen (A2c)

coordination. Specifically, our proposal may be

called a Complaints and Suggestions Web-Based

Collaborative Procedure (CS-WCP). We denominate

comment to both complaint and suggestion. Some

issues like the workflow of the system, notifications

from/to different actors of the system, states of the

procedure, mail messages, different roles, the

validation of comments and procedure times have

been specially studied in order to obtain the final

collaborative system proposed.

CS-WCP includes three intelligent agents

supporting tasks that are processed in a semi-

automatic manner. We say semi-automatic because

these agents suggest what to do, and they could do it

by themselves, but the last decision depends on the

final responsible of the system.

A town council is a place where people with

different cultures, religions, nature, disposition and

necessities arrive to solve their problems. At least in

Spain, due to immigration, this is an arising reality

of which civil servants are worried about.

An intuitive way to allow people to express

themselves provides rich and important information

to locally improve a society.

This work also shows a complete description of

the workflow system, as well as some empirical

results of the CS-WCP application and a report on

its evaluation.

The context of the project is described in section

2, and then the main workflow is described in

section 3, including a description about necessary

roles and comment marks. Automatic matching for

classification of comments is explained in section 4.

Finally, conclusions and future work are introduced

in section 5.

A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION

309

2 MAIN WORKFLOW AND

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

From a simple point of view, the system takes a

comment (it may be a complaint or a suggestion)

which is sent to the Town Council through the Web.

It is processed, some times automatically, some

times manually, and then, the comment is taken into

account.

Due to this workflow model, the system is

completely described in a comprehensible way to all

the people involved in the development of the final

system: civil servant, analysts and developers.

Figure 1 shows the complete chart of the main

process in blocks. Obviously, the process is not as

simple and it will be described in the following

sections, block by block.

In concrete, these blocks are: (1) complaint or

suggestion arrival, (2) validation of comments, (3)

invalid comment workflow, (4) valid comment

workflow, and (5) complaints control time.

Complaint or suggestion arrival block describes

the arrival of a comment to the system, just before

starting the real process.

Then a validation process about the content of

the comment is necessary to filter only constructive

messages. This is the validation comment block. An

intelligent agent, the Semi-automatic Garbage

Content agent, classifies comments as valid or

invalid; then, a particular user of the system decides

what to do with the comments, or they even can be

automatically eliminated.

Invalid comment workflow block shows the way

in which an invalid comment is eliminated from the

system.

Valid comment workflow block shows the logical

steps followed for a valid comment. In this block

there are two more intelligent agents: the first one –

the Unit Assignment agent - recommends a re-

assignment of a comment to a Unit Responsible

(zero, one or more units, as described later on), but

the main responsible of the system would have the

last word; and the second one – the Comment

Classification agent - classifies comments

semantically according to a valid vocabulary for the

administrative unit.

The last block, complaints control time,

describes two threshold times in the system.

The workflow has been modelled by means of

basic flow charts using MS Visio and the application

is a work in progress which is being developed using

PHP technology. This basic flow chart has been

extended with a new figure to support intelligent

agent modelling.

For a better understanding of the system, we

include this subsection to briefly describe both the

necessary roles and the comment marks, which will

be mentioned later on.

A user in the system accessing to the Web

without authentication, that is to say, with the

default user, is considered to be a Citizen. This is a

public role. Neither a user nor a password is required

to access the system as a Citizen. Complaints and

suggestions could be sent through the system, but we

have considered that a valid e-mail is essential for

providing responses to the citizens. Any user with

another role needs to be authenticated in the system.

A Reception Responsible user receives all the

comments (complaints and suggestions) and he may

personally answer to the comments or assign them to

Unit Responsible users, assisted by the two

mentioned intelligent agents, the Unit Assignment

agent and the Comment Classification agent.

The

Unit Responsible user is usually a civil

servant in an administrative unit. Such a user only

receives assigned comments from the Reception

Responsible and he must answer in time.

There is a final role in the system, the General

Administrator. This user is in charge of creating,

modifying and deleting users.

And on the other hand, a series of comment

marks have been created so that users and

administrators can follow the process of any

comment: (1) Kind, an initial classification of the

comments –might be a complaint or a suggestion;

(2) Received, the comment has been received and

saved in the system and may be processed; (3)

Invalid, a rude, insulting, offensive or non

constructive comment, which will not be accepted in

the system; (4) Analyzed and Valid, if the content

analyzed is accepted; (5) Threshold, when a timely

warning threshold has been overcome; (6) Timeout,

when a final time-based threshold has been

exceeded; (7) Assigned, if the Reception Responsible

has re-addressed the comment to a Unit Responsible;

(8) Answered, for the case of a complaint that has

been answered; and finally, (9) Filed, when the

process is fully accomplished.

3 COMPLAINT OR SUGGESTION

ARRIVAL

Complaint or suggestion arrival comprises the time

range from the moment when a user enters a

comment in the system up to the logical bifurcation -

complaint or suggestion-.

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

310

When a citizen wants to file a complaint or a

suggestion (a comment, in general) by means of our

CS-WCP, he must fill in an electronic form with the

following data: (1) an e-mail address where the

answers will be sent back, the text of the comment,

and the kind of the comment (complaint or

suggestion). These are mandatory fields. Some more

information is optional (2): name, surname, identity

card, address, phone, mobile phone, and the name of

the administrative unit involved in the comment.

And, some additional information (3) is saved in an

automatic manner: arrival date and hour of the

incoming comment.

Users of the system are warned about acceptance

conditions for theirs comments (rude, insulting,

offensive, non constructive comments are not

allowed) and they are also informed of the next steps

which are going to follow the actual one.

It is important to have a correct e-mail for feed

back. This way, citizens receive an e-mail for

confirmation purpose, and then, comments must be

confirmed by citizens through this e-mail. Only

when a confirmation of a comment arrives to the

system, the process is actually started.

There are three tasks performed in parallel at this

point: (1) a notification is sent to the Reception

Responsible (see section about roles), (2) a new

comment thread is saved, and (3) a gratefulness

message including some information about the next

steps is shown on the user’s screen.

CS-WCP is a server-side program with some

Web interface clients. The notification mechanism to

alert to Reception Responsible (and remainder

notifications) is a collaborative system based on e-

mail and on the Web. The Reception Responsible

receives an e-mail with the new comment, but he has

the whole information, even the notification in his

intranet client too.

Both his intranet and the e-mail contain the

identification and the text of the comment, the

date/hour of arrival, the final date/hour threshold

(there is a legal limit to answer a complaint; this is

logically not the case for a suggestion), and how

much time is left for administration to answer.

There are also three important links: (1) Invalid,

to mark a comment as invalid because of its

unacceptable content; (2) Assign, to send the

comment to a Unit Responsible (see section about

roles); and (3) Answer, to initiate the answer about

the complaint filed.

Depending on the kind of comment, complaint or

suggestion, the workflow will take one different

way, deriving to one or another task.

4 VALIDATION OF COMMENTS

Once a comment is saved in the system, a set of

tasks is performed depending on the kind of

comment. If it is a complaint, a set of tasks will be

performed, and a different set will be performed if it

is a suggestion.

Anyway, an acknowledgement is always mailed

to the user. Acknowledgements include the final

date when the response should be answered (only for

complaints). Comments in this point will be marked

as Received Comment.

Afterwards, the Reception Responsible will

analyze the comment in order to check if the content

of the comment is appropriate. Remember that rude,

insulting, offensive or non constructive comments

are not allowed. But, as told before the Reception

Responsible is guided in his decision through the

intelligent agent called the Semi-automatic Garbage

Content agent.

This agent behaves as a filtering agent (Sim, 04)

and classifies comments as valid or invalid; then, a

particular user of the system decides what to do with

the comment, or it even can be automatically

eliminated.

For this purpose, the agent is fed by a vocabulary

containing a full set of semantic terms related to

unsound words. The agent automatically mines the

comments to extract the number of words present in

the unsound vocabulary database.

The recommendation of the Semi-automatic

Garbage Content agent is two-fold: valid comment,

if the number of unacceptable terms in the comment

is reasonably low or invalid comment, when the

number of invalid terms overcomes a predefined

score.

The agent also offers the number of bad sounding

words detected in the comment.

5 INVALID COMMENT

WORKFLOW

Notice again that the content of a comment may be

non constructive. In other words, someone on the

Internet could introduce nonsense in the CS-WCP

system, or perhaps some impolite expressions could

be added, or something like this. So, comments are

analyzed in a semi-automatic way.

Firstly the intelligent agent associated to this task

recommends a decision.

A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION

311

Then, if the decision taken by the responsible

person is finally that the comment is invalid, two

parallel tasks are performed.

The first one is to mark the comment as an

invalid comment, and it is separately saved (for

future statistic purposes).

Additionally, a negative acknowledgement is

sent to the citizen who made this comment to inform

him in a cordial manner about the reasons of the

rejection.

6 VALID COMMENT

WORKFLOW

At the moment when the Reception Responsible

accepts the comment as a valid comment -after

accepting the recommendation of the intelligent

agent to mark the comment as valid, or after not

accepting the recommendation of the Semi-

automatic Garbage Content agent to mark the

comment as invalid-, it is marked as an Analyzed

and Valid Comment.

Here a new intelligent agent –a user assistant

(Lieberman, 98) and recommender agent (Curran,

04)-, namely the Unit Assignment agent assists the

Reception Responsible in the decision of who is the

best-tailored person to handle with the complaint or

suggestion. The assistant agent again mines the

comment looking for semantic terms related to the

administrative units of the council. This agent, as it

may be appreciated, performs a semi-automatic

ontology-based information extraction. A

recommendation algorithm offers as output zero, one

or a set of ascending ordered possible unit

candidates. A value of zero means that the Unit

Assignment agent is not able to recommend one

concrete administrative unit to be the more confident

to the suggestion or complaint. Obviously, in this

case, a reasonable action for the Reception

Responsible is to personally handle the comment. A

sorted set of administrative units means that more

than one unit may be related to the incoming

message. If lastly the Reception Responsible decides

that one Unit Responsible is the person who should

answer, he assigns this comment to the Unit

Responsible from a predefined list. The Unit

Responsible selected by the Reception Responsible

may coincide with one unit responsible

recommended by the Unit Assignment agent. But

this is always up to the Reception Responsible.

The Unit Responsible selected will receive an e-

mail notification with the assignment and he is

invited to analyze the comment. A third and last

intelligent agent helps in classifying the comment

that arrives to a unit. The idea behind the use of this

Comment Classification agent was originally to aid

the Unit Responsible in keeping track of the great

variety of comments through appropriate clustering

techniques. This classification is also being used to

throw interesting statistics of the contents of the

comments that are sent by the citizens. The

Comment Classification agent is fully inspired in the

so called semantic agents (Korhonen, 03), which

operate on the semantic web. The semantic web is

an extension of the current web in which

information is given well-defined meaning. A

semantic agent introduces a set of descriptors,

including the vocabulary, the semantic

interconnections and some simple rules of inference

and logic.

Of course, this new event is also displayed in his

intranet and the comment is marked as an Assigned

Comment.

Either the Reception Responsible or the Unit

Responsible has to take into account the comment if

it is a suggestion. Then, it will be filed and marked

Filed Comment. Now, if the comment is a

complaint, it has to be answered in time. The

response is added to the comment, and the comment

is marked as an Answered Comment, so it can be

filed. Lastly it is marked as a Filed Comment.

7 COMPLAINTS CONTROL

TIME

Spanish laws force public administrations to

establish a limit time for any administrative

procedure. That is, administrative procedures should

be completed in a finite time (MAP, 92)(MAP, 00).

If a person of the public administration does not

answer a question in time, obviously the system can

not do much. Nevertheless the system helps the

public workers by providing two control times.

A person who has to answer a complaint always

can see how much time is left in the intranet of the

CS-WCP system. He perfectly knows that the

answers must be sent out before the final time. In

order to provide an efficient aid, the system

incorporates two thresholds: a warning threshold

and a final threshold.

The first one, the warning threshold, is always

lower than the other one. When the procedure is near

to finish without being answered a new e-mail is

sent to the person who must answer (Reception

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

312

Responsible or

Unit Responsible), alerting about the

proximity of the final time.

This complaint comment is stuck out in the main

web page of the intranet of the responsible person.

This control time is only a warning about the

proximity of the final time. As this is only a

warning, the responsible can still answer the

complaint in time. Obviously, this control tries to

avoid the lack of answers because of oblivion or

omission.

The e-mail contents are in form of messages.

The text and the final time are displayed. Below the

text of the complaint, a link called Answer permits to

answer this complaint.

It was said before that this warning is sent to

Reception Responsible or to Unit Responsible. The

reason for this differentiation is the following one: if

a comment is marked as an assigned comment, then

the complaint should be answered by a Unit

Responsible, but if it is not marked as an assigned

comment, this is due to the fact that the Reception

Responsible decided to respond by himself.

Warnings are only for people who should answer the

complaint.

Otherwise, if nobody answers a complaint after

the final threshold, then this would be the worst

situation and three parallel tasks would be

performed: (1) to notify this fact to the Reception

Responsible, (2) to mark the comment as a timeout

comment, and (3) to show this information in the

intranet of the Reception Responsible.

The first and the third tasks are very similar. The

only difference is that notifications are made by e-

mail. Thus, an e-mail is sent to the Reception

Responsible as the final responsible of the electronic

system to inform him about this situation. Perhaps

he was the person who should have responded the

complaint, but if the responsible person was a Unit

Responsible, the Reception Responsible should be

aware of this situation. A notification is also sent to

a Unit Responsible if he was the one who should

have answered. A notification includes as

information the text of the complaint, the final date

and hour, and the responsible of its response. This

information is shown in the intranet of the

responsible person in the same way.

8 SYSTEM EVALUATION AND

EMPIRICAL RESULTS

The system has being developed in the context of a

Research + Develop project in a real scenario. All

the analysis, modelling and developing stages have

finished and now we have finished the test process,

therefore we also present such results in this work.

We have worked together with the local public

administration managers to define the system.

Before the CS-WCP system had been deployed,

the town-council received two or three suggestions a

day and it was not possible to citizens to distinguish

between complaints and suggestions. Moreover, the

suggestions are not processed with the desired time

because there is not a system like CS-WCP running.

Due to this system, complaints and suggestions

from citizens are well redistributed. CS-WCP forces

the collaboration of different areas inside the town-

council in order to build a suitable response to the

demanding citizen. Hence, citizens’ demands are

oriented to people at the town council who are going

to answer in the best possible way. It does not matter

if citizens are from one culture or another, if they

need one thing or another. The comment will arrive

to the most suitable worker.

During the time we have analyzed the system,

twelve months, it has received 471 suggestions and

complaints. With the CS-WCP system, the Albacete

Town-Council has improved the citizen participation

(Masters, 04). The CS-WCP system is not only a

mailbox of suggestions. The Town-Council must

provide an administrative response to the citizen

who has sent a complaint or a suggestion.

One of the indirect benefits of the system is the

inclusion of a simple filter by means of the e-mail

validation. This technique has allowed avoiding a

high amount of malicious emails sent to the system.

Figure 2 shows two views of the administrative

module of the CS-WCP. This module is used by

civil-servant to follow the status of each complaint

or suggestion. A colour bullet indicates the status:

new, pending, transferred, processing, waiting,

positive response, negative response, out of date. A

responsible of an administrative area can check his

own list of complaints and suggestions and he can

manage the status of the item.

During this period of 12 months, over 75% of

the suggestions and complaints arrived to the system

via the Web. The civil-servant uses the CS-WCP in

all cases to manage the different complaints and

suggestions. The rest over 25% arrived by phone

calls or by paper using the Citizen Office. It can be

noted how citizens mostly prefer to use the Web to

communicate their suggestions or complaints.

A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION

313

Figure 2: Managing complaints and suggestions.

Another interesting point is the channel selected by

citizens to receive the administrative response:

• By letter: 33,3%

• E-mail: 63,91 %

• Fax: 0,21 %

• Phone: 2,55 %

As it can be observed, over 75% of citizens use

the Web to put their complaint and suggestion but

only over 63,91% of citizens prefers to receive the

administrative response via e-mail.

The different complaints and suggestions can be

organized in administrative areas depending on the

subject. The areas involved in this first year of the

system are the next ones:

• Mayor’s Office: 13,16%

• Environment: 14,23%

• Quality: 10,83%

• Culture, Sports and Festivities: 12,31%

• Personal, Internal questions, Finances: 5,52%

• Woman, Equality, Participation: 1,91%

• Town Planning: 5,52%

The user satisfaction and the quality of service of

the local public administration are increased thanks

to the rapid processing of complaints and

suggestions. Citizens feel that town-council hears

what they have to say.

The system can be tested on http://

www.albacete.es and it is available only in Spanish.

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

314

9 CONCLUSIONS AND FINAL

REMARKS

An intelligent Web-based collaborative system to

support the suggestions and complaints

administrative procedure called CS-WCP has been

presented. The work presented is a mature project

currently running in the Town Council of Albacete

(Spain). This project consists of a large analysis of

the needs of a town council, some models to

represent such a reality, an application to solve the

situation, and some empirical results after a year of

success working.

Complaint is a common activity in modern

societies. There is a high degree of demand and

people expect that public services increase more and

more their quality. A good quantity of suggestions

reveals the society degree of maturity. Modern

public administration need to hear the opinion of

their citizens.

A town-council is a rich scenario for the

deployment of CSCW systems because there are

several groups and roles of people working together.

It is also a special scenario where many different

people (culture, religion, nature, disposition and

necessities) arrive to look for a solution to their daily

and particular problems.

Both complaint and suggestions are managed by

different groups inside the town-council in a

collaborative way. CSCW system plays an important

role to help public administration reach a higher

level of quality.

The main collaborative aspects managed in this

system are the coordination between different civil

servant to attend the complaints or suggestions and

the communication between public administration

and citizens.

The procedure has been modelled using a

workflow system and moved from manual to

semiautomatic due to the introduction of intelligent

agents.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Spanish CICYT

project TIN2004-08000-C03-01 and the grant

PAI06-0093 from Junta de Comunidades de

Castilla-La Mancha.

REFERENCES

Curran, K., Murphy, C., Annesley S., Web intelligence in

information retrieval. Information Technology

Journal, (volume 3: issue 2), 2004, pp. 196-201.

Greif, I., Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book

of Readings. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo CA,

1988.

Grudin, J., CSCW: History and Focus. University of

California. IEEE Computer, 27, 5, 1994, pp. 19-26.

Johnson-Lenz, P. and Johnson-Lenz, T., Consider the

Groupware: Design and Group Process Impacts on

Communication in the Electronic Medium. In Hiltz, S.

and Kerr, E. (Ed.): Studies of Computer-Mediated

Communications Systems: A Synthesis of the

Findings, Research Report, Band 16Computerized

Conferencing and Communications Center, New

Jersey Institute of Technology: Newark, New Jersey,

1981.

Korhonen, J., Pajunen, L., Puustjärvi, J., Automatic

composition of web wervice workflows using a

semantic agent. IEEE/WIC International Conference

on Web Intelligence (WI'03), 2003, pp. 566-569.

Lieberman, H., Integrating user interface agents with

conventional applications. Knowledge-Based Systems

(volume 11, sigue 1), 1998, pp. 15-24.

Masters, Z., Macintosh, A. and Smith, E., Young People

and E-Democracy: Creating a Culture of

Participation' Proceedings of Third International

Conference in E-Government, EGOV 2004; Zaragoza,

Spain; 30th August to 3rd September, 2004.

Ministerio para las Administraciones Públicas, Ley

30/1992 de Régimen Jurídico de las Administraciones

Públicas y del Procedimiento Administrativo Común,

Madrid. Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas,

1992.

Ministerio para las Administraciones Públicas, Libro

Blanco para la Mejora de los Servicios Públicos,

Madrid: MAP, 2000.

Sim, K.M., Toward an ontology-enhanced information

filtering agent. ACM SIGMOD (Volume 33, Issue 1),

March 2004, pp. 95-100.

A COLLABORATIVE WEB SYSTEM TO IMPROVE CITIZENS-ADMINISTRATION COMMUNICATION

315