Eye on South Holland

Province of South Holland

It is important for the province to have up-to-date information on what is going on within the 50 municipalities in South Holland. Insight into trends are important for responding to relevant developments properly and timely. This is presented on a smart news portal for the province called Oog op Zuid-Holland.

Last change on 22nd of November 2024, at 11:24 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: Field not filled in.
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Organisation and business operations

Begin date

Field not filled in.

Contact information

Voor vragen en opmerkingen kun je terecht bij: [e-mail] Wil je bezwaar maken, dan kun je terecht bij de Juridische afdeling van dienst beheer organisatie: https://www.zuid-holland.nl/contact/

Link to source registration

https://www.zuid-holland.nl/politiek-bestuur/feiten-cijfers/algoritmeregister/algoritme-sentimentanalyse-oog-zuid-holland/#hcb5f0de6-1f15-4ae6-8ed0-352b01b1d934

Responsible use

Goal and impact

It is important for the province to have up-to-date information on what is going on in the 50 municipalities in South Holland. Insight into trends, opportunities and threats are important so that we can respond to relevant developments properly and in a timely manner. We aim for a situation where the province can pick up signals from its surroundings faster and more accurately. With Oog op Zuid-Holland as issue analysis, we can:

• Easily access relevant information from municipalities
• Provide a complete picture of the relevant sources at municipalities
• The information can be clustered and filtered by topic
• Provide added value over existing provincial systems such as Coosto (a tool for social media) and LexisNexis (a tool for social media)

Goal: to be able to better monitor developments that are happening in municipalities.

As a province, it is important for us to have up-to-date information on what is going on within its 50 municipalities. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to extract patterns from large-scale data and identify the opinions of relevant stakeholders. This enables constructive responses and better action by the province.

As a province, we already use 2 media monitoring systems, namely Lexis Nexis (newspapers) and Coosto (social media). Besides newspapers and X, Oog op Zuid-Holland also contains news from political parties and council documents from public meetings. Oog op Zuid-Holland has a more complete picture of the news spectrum compared to existing systems. It also selects relevant information better than current systems. Another added value offered by Oog op Zuid-Holland is ease of use. This stems from the fact that customisation is provided. It is also an advantage that the information can be filtered at both municipal and subject level.

Eye on South Holland saved the testers time. Those who peruse the news through Oog op Zuid-Holland go much faster. Oog op Zuid-Holland goes through large amounts of data sources. As a result, it summarises a large amount of data and testers go through news that they would never normally look up (X, news reports political parties).

Considerations

The desired benefits outweigh the benefits in practice. These are particularly limited in time savings and diversity of sources consulted. They are sources that could otherwise also be consulted by employees.

Human intervention

What Oog op Zuid-Holland cannot do is predict an administratively difficult period/administrative crisis. At team Quality Public Administration, they know better than anyone how difficult it is to see a crisis coming. Oog op Zuid-Holland only displays indicators that could indicate a crisis. It is always up to us humans, team Quality Public Administration, to bundle and interpret those signals.

Risk management

The question is whether Oog op Zuid-Holland does not miss sources and is complete. Therefore, it is difficult to trust Oog op Zuid-Holland 100%. Messages considered relevant by the testers were not always displayed in Oog op Zuid-Holland.

The results of the algorithm support province employees in their information provision, but do not independently lead to decisions affecting individual citizens.

Legal basis

Role of provinces vis-à-vis supervision of municipalities.

The province monitors whether municipalities are handling their money properly. Provinces also promote cooperation between municipalities and monitor the quality of local government.

Elaboration on impact assessments

No DPIA was carried out for this tool because the algorithm does not perform automated decision-making or profiling with significant legal or similar effects on individuals. It does not process sensitive data or data on a large scale, does not use new or unpredictable technologies, and does not systematically monitor individuals. In addition, it does not aggregate datasets and the algorithm does not have a public impact with broad societal consequences. Moreover, the data used by the algorithm is public and published by public agencies and individuals.

Operations

Data

50 councils are now being scanned for resources. That's more than 385 websites, open council information and more than 1,000 X accounts.

Technical design

The BERT model is used to classify messages for relevance to the quality of public administration and supervision: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/bert.