III: Small: Organizational Responsiveness to Open Outside Input: A Modeling Approach based on Statistical Text and Network Analysis

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This project focuses on the development of new analytical tools for modeling the relationships between intra-organizational communication networks and open, external sources of text data. The massive quantities of textual communications generated within organizations constitute a largely untapped source for insightful, timely organizational analytics. The tools under development for this project are designed to jointly analyze the content of communications and the socio-organizational structure comprised by communication ties, thereby allowing researchers and practitioners to identify and analyze the ways in which government officials' extra-governmental communications are related to intra-governmental communications and operations. In producing these tools, this project builds upon extant textual and network analysis methods by focusing on novel probabilistic methods for identifying topics that cut across network domains (e.g., informal email communications, official meeting minutes, and final policy records) and representing the complex flow of topics through government decision and policy-making processes. These methods, along with data collected during the course of this project, enhance organizations' ability to connect streams of external input to their internal operations. In conjunction with a new, publicly available database of local government communication records, this project showcases and builds upon the success of recent efforts, encompassing the gov2.0 movement, to improve government responsiveness through the solicitation of open outside input.