The authors found following points after the analyses of literature:
1. For the first issue dimension, the government agencies could proceed step by step, from the role and position of general public and through the applications of geographic information systems and spatial data mining technology, three important jobs in citizen knowledge management: reveal citizen knowledge, classify knowledge and upgrade knowledge, and further to induct and extract the knowledge of government’s implementation of policy with policy implications;
2. For the second issue dimension, explore the key factors that may affect the willingness of civil service system to accept the knowledge about public opinions in policy process that is closely related to the civil official’s behaviors of responding citizen’s demands through the exercise of discretion;
3. For the third issue dimension, the civil official’s behaviors of response and discretion will be affected by factors of the external control, internal values and administrative system and procedures. In turn, the three factors may be affected by the quality of citizen knowledge management.
After analyses of data, following key points were found in the study:
1. Under the help of the data of parking violation and derelict garbage petition cases provided by Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) of Taipei Government, and applications of the recently developed geographic information system and spatial information mining technology, an exemplary citizen knowledge management system was established that successfully demonstrate
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how a government agency help policy-decision makers to extract the information of public opinions that contain the decision making implications from the huge amount of petition data. It is worth noting that the users should understand basic assumption of each method, limits of analytic method and correct method of interpretation of analytic results in using various spatial analytical methods.
Regarding the mapping, because it is based on point data shown by petition cases, the mapping should select appropriate spatial analytic method according to the type of point data. On the methodology of spatial cluster analyses, the analyses of point data mainly use two methods: average proximity analysis and estimation of nucleation density.
2. From the interviews with the heads of 1999 citizen hotline and the heads and undertakers in agencies that received the most of petition cases in five capitals, we learned the cognition of responsive ideas by practitioners and the key factors that might affect in enhancing government’s responsiveness to common people and the process of including opinions from common people into policy. Among which, the majority of the surveyed said that information technology could provide practitioners effective help in citizen participation and internal management. But they also reminded us that we have to pay attention to the problems of the digital gap and the increase of pressure on civil servants. From the in-depth interviews, we learned that the key factors affecting the civil service system’s intention to accept knowledge about public opinions were: the degree of the convergence of public opinions, meeting the preferences of decision-makers, meeting the professional judgment of civil service, the importance of issue and whether the government resources were enough.
3. Through the surveys among civil servants, the study found that their responsive discretion behaviors included three standards for response, they were: efficiency of response, effectiveness of response and impartialness of response.
4. For the efficiency of response, the key factors that might affect civil servants’ efficiency of response were: the enhancement of civil servants’ sense of professional mission as a public official including the sense of honor, the self-cognition of contribution to the society, the ability to explore the overall public problems and the ability to self-examine operation procedures and contents. Secondly, the leader’s effectiveness of leadership, including the trust by subordinates, problem-solving ability, coordination ability and the degree of support to subordinates, should be paid more attention by public mangers. In addition, preventing the civil servants from defying public opinions, such as deception, bribes, leaking people’s individual information, was helpful to the enhancement of efficiency.
Lastly, the implementation of citizen knowledge management was also helpful to the efficiency in responding the demands from public opinions.
5. For the effectiveness of response, in addition to the enhancement of civil servants’ sense of professional mission and reduction of the degree of defying public opinions, how to reduce the workload of civil servants, such as the pressure of lobbying from leaders and elected representative, pressure from dealing with interpersonal relationship stakes and pressure from workload were the key factors that might affect the enhancement of effectiveness of response.
Secondly, enhancing the civil servants’ degree of recognition of internal management measures including performance appraisals, transparency of division of labor, sharing of internal knowledge and education and training as well as the strengthening of obeying
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superior’s orders, such as the degree of convincing and acceptance of leader’s opinions by the subordinates, was the affecting factor that is noteworthy. Certainly, the citizen knowledge management system also affected the responsiveness of civil servants. But it was limited by the civil servants’ cognition of functions of existing information system only on the information of quantity and functions needed to execution and less understanding of functions of decision-making support, such as geographic information function recommended by the study. That limited the civil servants’ potentials of cognition of enhancing the effectiveness of response by the citizen knowledge system.
6. For the impartialness of response, the enhancement of the degree of recognition of internal management of mistakes was the key factor.
This study concluded that when a civil servant was treated impartially by his or her agency, he or she would in turn treat people who submit petitions. Secondly, the reduction the defiance of public opinions and enhancement of effectiveness of leadership would be key factors that might affect civil servants’ impartialness of response.
However, the citizen knowledge management system was not helpful to the impartialness of response.
Lastly, this study makes specific recommendations to the practical policy for the above-mentioned findings, including enhancement of analyzability and adjustment of procedures of research, development and evaluation to help encourage civil servants’ intention to respond public opinions. In addition, from the angle of research, it is also hoped that the future researches may have a more comprehensive design, thinking the collection, classification of data about citizen’s active participation and the method of information depth mining from the angle of citizen knowledge management on one hand, and thinking how to enhance the
civil servants’ ability to explore and respond the public preferences from the design of management mechanism on the other hand to concretely realize the ideas of responsive government.
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