More Ickson
email: moreikson@gmail.com

Judy Backhouse

Towards a "Smart Society" Through a Connected and Smart Citizenry in South Africa: A Review of the National Broadband Strategy

Keywords: smart citizen, smart society, e-government, institutional theory

des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

Governments around the world have realised the great potential of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to create so called "smart societies" for social and economic development [START_REF] Phang | A framework of ICT exploitation for e-participation initiatives[END_REF]. Broadband internet access has been recognised as an enabling technology for connecting people, businesses and governments in the smart society [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF].The adoption of inclusive and effective broadband policies has thus been identified as a critical step in enhancing digital connectivity [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF].

In this study we explore the implementation of broadband and other relevant policies aimed at assisting South Africa to realise its vision of a smart and connected society by 2030. Lofgren [START_REF] Lofgren | The Governance of E-government: A Governance Perspective on the Swedish E-government Strategy[END_REF] argues that "mainstream e-government literature rarely goes beyond basic descriptions of the policy ideas and the actors behind them. The bargaining and negotiations between policy actors (both inside and outside the government), which initiate the policy, set the agenda, as well as actually implement the policy, has been notably overlooked in the literature of e-government." This is the gap this study is hoping to close by contributing new knowledge through the use of institutional theory as a lens for understanding institutional forces that have impacted policy implementation in a developing country context.

In the last decade, South Africa has made progress towards building a "smart society", realising the value of ICT in the social and economic development of the country. It is one of the few countries in Africa that has adopted the "smart" agenda through initiatives such as "smart cities" which include efforts to enhance connectivity through broadband, digital access and e-literacy of residents [START_REF] Backhouse | Smart city agendas of African cities[END_REF].The National Development Plan (NDP) is South Africa"s national strategic framework which sets a vision for the development of the country, including developing an ICT infrastructure for stimulating social and economic development. A concern that the NDP seeks to address is that "South Africa's ICT sector has not brought affordable, universal access to the full range of communications services and has lost its status as continental leader in internet and broadband connectivity" [START_REF] South | National broadband policy[END_REF]. Only 49% of South Africa"s population is using the internet, ranking 40 th among 144 developing countries. Access to fixed broadband per 100 capita still remains low at 3.3 with an overall ranking of 110 out of the 189 International Telecommunications Union member states [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF].

Smart societies are being brought about as "society is moving towards a sociotechnical ecosystem in which physical and virtual dimensions of life are intertwined and where people interactions ever more take place with or are mediated by machines" [START_REF] Scekic | Smart Society: A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation[END_REF]. The concept of smart society is based on the idea of how the technosocial trends can be leveraged towards addressing some of the challenges facing modern society [START_REF] Hartswood | Towards the ethical governance of smart society[END_REF]. A smart society is thus an advanced stage of the information and knowledge society characterised by communities with diverse values, needs and skills yet linked by a common identity [START_REF] Lapo | From Information to Smart Society: environment, politics and economics[END_REF][START_REF] Scekic | Smart Society: A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation[END_REF]. It is also defined as "one that successfully harnesses the potential of digital technology and connected devices and the use of digital networks to improve people"s lives" [START_REF] Levy | Towards a smart society[END_REF]. From these definitions, it is clear that smart societies are driven by technology, digital connectivity, knowledge, skills, common goals and innovation to institute political, social and economic development.

Policy implementation remains one of the significant challenges in governing the "smart" environment [START_REF] Scholl | Smart Governance: A Roadmap for Research and Practice[END_REF].The purpose of this study is therefore to provide an understanding of how institutional pressures in government have influenced policy implementation in the "smart" era. We conducted this study in a developing country context, where few such studies have been conducted and findings will strengthen policy implementation through a better understanding of forces impacting e-government.

The main question shaping this study is:

 What institutional barriers is the South African government facing in its bid to create a connected and smart citizenry that is responsive to the smart society?

The main objectives of the study are to:  Understand barriers confronting the South African government in its bid to create a smart citizenry that is responsive to the demands of a smart society.

 Examine how policy implementation impacts broadband penetration to increase citizen connectivity in realising the vision of a smart society in South Africa.

This paper is divided into two sections; the first section reviews literature on increasing citizen participation in a smart society. The second section discusses challenges in smart society development in South Africa using institutional theory as a lens to explain and understand issues confronting government in policy implementation.

Methodology

The study is a qualitative interpretive case study as its purpose is to understand the complex social, cultural, economic and political issues surrounding policy implementation in South Africa. A review of literature and documentary evidence were used as the main methods of gathering data. Literature on smart societies and government to citizen e-government was reviewed so as to help understand some of the issues confronting governments in their bid to develop smart societies. We reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2015 because the "smart agenda" is still a fairly new concept in e-government research. Literature searches using key words such as "smart society" , "smart citizen", " smart government", " broadband penetration" and "eparticipation" were conducted across four databases namely Google scholar, Science direct, IEEE explore and Wiley online. For documentary evidence, we reviewed the national broadband policy and other strategic national policies addressing the "smart agenda" published in the last 10 years (2005-2015) so as to understand institutional pressures impacting smart initiatives in South Africa (see table 1). Relevant government and media reports were also used as sources of data. International reports such as the United Nations e-government report, Alliance for Affordable Internet and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) broadband reports were also consulted. Documents often contain rich information about institutions and their actions which may be difficult to gather through other methods such as interviews. The plan seeks to transform the economic landscape through provision of key national infrastructure such as ICT, transport etc to strengthen service delivery. Integrated ICT policy (2013)

The policy integrates the telecommunications, broadcasting and ICT framework into one policy framework due to convergence of Technology National Broadband Policy (2013) Provision of broadband services to ensure social and economic inclusion.

Thematic analysis was used for analysing qualitative data and it involved identifying general themes in the data. Closed (deductive) coding was used to identify and classify themes of interest coming through from literature and theory.

Theoretical framework

The study is underpinned by institutional theory which helps in understanding the interlinked and complex relationships inherent in institutional mechanisms, technology, social, and economic context, and institutional factors in which they are embedded [START_REF] Luna-Reyes | Using institutional theory and dynamic simulation to understand complex e-government phenomena[END_REF]. We examine how internal and external institutional pressures have influenced policy implementation in support of smart society development in South Africa. Institutional theory is used as a lens for understanding how institutional ele-ments, including regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements, together with their associated resources and activities identified by Scott [START_REF] Scott | Institutions and organizations[END_REF] have influenced progress towards the smart agenda in South Africa. We also explore the three mechanisms identified by DiMaggio and Powell [START_REF] Dimaggio | The iron cage revisited-Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality[END_REF], through which isomorphic change occurs to understand institutional pressures influencing the smart agenda. These include coercive isomorphism that stems from formal and informal political influence to institutionalise certain rules and practices, mimetic isomorphism which results from pressure to imitate other organisations as standard responses from uncertainty and the need to minimise risk, and normative isomorphism associated with professionalisation of organisational actors. Institutional theory was used for identifying themes in the data for analysis. The adoption of institutional theory is particularly appropriate given the multidisciplinary nature of this study. This study crosses disciplines such as information systems, public administration and information science in the investigation of societal, technological and political issues central in the study of e-government.

Increasing citizen participation in a smart society

The country"s citizens have been recognised as the most important beneficiaries of a connected and smart society [START_REF] South | National broadband policy[END_REF]. E-government services worldwide have tended to shift towards being citizen centric as the successful transition towards a smart society relies on the ability of citizens to participate fully in government"s smart initiatives [START_REF] Chen | Citizen-centric e-government services: Understanding integrated citizen service information systems[END_REF][START_REF] Purao | Modelling citizen-centric services in smart cities[END_REF]55].There are few definitions of "smart citizen" appearing in academic and practitioner literature. Smart citizen has been defined as "the citizen with wisdom and virtue based on collective opinion" [START_REF] Noh | A Study on Innovative Model for Communication System of Political Parties in Korea by using Big data[END_REF]. It has also been defined as "the one who is healthy, having morals and create smart plan for all activities in best manner" [START_REF] Liyanage | Planning smart meal in a smart city for a smart living[END_REF]. From these two definitions it is clear that the concept of "smart citizen" has not been approached from the socio-technical perspective. It is against this background that we propose the following definition in the e-government context: A smart citizen is "a technologically savvy citizen who has access to information and knowledge which they use to make informed choices in participating in social, economic, political and other activities in a smart society". Citizen engagement and participation in government activities is one of the key features of smart societies. Electronic participation (e-participation) is defined as the use of ICTs to enhance citizen engagement and participation in government [START_REF] Fedotova | E-participation in Portugal: evaluation of government electronic platforms[END_REF][START_REF] Panopoulou | Success factors in designing eParticipation initiatives[END_REF]. The use of sophisticated ICTs in government has "little social value if citizens are not able to use services or interact in political processes in meaningful ways" [START_REF] Helbig | Understanding the complexity of electronic government: Implications from the digital divide literature[END_REF]. Citizen participation has however been compromised by a complexity of factors such as mistrust of government, mistrust of technology, low e-literacy and low access to technology [START_REF] Belanger | A framework for e-government: privacy implications[END_REF][START_REF] Colesca | Understanding trust in e-government[END_REF]. In the next sub-section we discuss several factors that have been identified in literature as important in developing a smart and connected citizenry that is responsive to the demands of smart society.

Technology: Information and communication infrastructure

At the heart of the convergence of ICT, telecommunications and broadcasting is the need for modern high-tech telecommunication infrastructure [START_REF] Gunasekaran | Emerging wireless technologies for developing countries[END_REF], such as broadband [START_REF] Chochliouros | Broadband access in the European Union: an enabler for technical progress, business renewal and social development[END_REF]. Broadband technologies have the potential to enhance the quality of life of citizens and improve connectedness between governments, businesses and their societies [START_REF] Firth | Broadband: benefits and problems[END_REF]. Broadband technologies promote the transition to smart societies by "modernizing economies and societies by stimulating the use of the internet and enabling the use of feature-rich applications and services" [START_REF] Trkman | Factors of broadband development and the design of a strategic policy framework[END_REF]. It is therefore clear that for smart societies to work, smart citizens need to be connected and broadband is needed for the levels of connectivity envisaged.

Broadband penetration is affected by supply side factors such as legislation, regulation, infrastructure and competition. It is also affected by demand factors such as affordability, its perceived value to citizens and business and socio-cultural factors such as e-readiness and acceptance of new technologies in society [START_REF] Belloc | Whither policy design for broadband penetration? Evidence from 30 OECD countries[END_REF][START_REF] Falch | Penetration of broadband services-The role of policies[END_REF][START_REF] Firth | Broadband: benefits and problems[END_REF][START_REF] Picot | The role of government in broadband access[END_REF][START_REF] Trkman | Factors of broadband development and the design of a strategic policy framework[END_REF].

Despite the recognition of broadband as a key enabler in creating a smart citizenry, the reality is that broadband penetration has been slow in developing countries as compared to developed economies. Lack of economic development, low Gross Domestic Product, low personal income levels and other socio-economic factors contribute to this [START_REF] Trkman | Factors of broadband development and the design of a strategic policy framework[END_REF]. Developing countries are still grappling with challenges such as poverty and poor health and hence connectivity is not an immediate priority [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF]. More than two billion people in developing countries are being "priced out" of accessing the internet [START_REF]Alliance for Affordable Internet[END_REF]. Population and demographic characteristics such as population density and urban versus rural populations were also found to have an impact [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF][START_REF] Trkman | Factors of broadband development and the design of a strategic policy framework[END_REF]. Expanding infrastructure to areas outside of urban areas, into remote and rural areas is one of the significant supply side challenge [START_REF]The state of Broadband 2015[END_REF].This is especially true in developing countries where a significant population still lives in rural areas. In South Africa for example an estimated 40% of the population live in rural areas [START_REF]National Development Plan[END_REF].

E-skills for a connected and smart citizenry

The e-skills of citizens is one of the important factors that influence citizens" ability to leverage the benefits of a smart society. Leading countries in broadband penetration such as Singapore, were found to have higher e-skills levels [START_REF] Chan | E-government implementation: A macro analysis of Singapore's e-government initiatives[END_REF]. Citizen participation in smart societies is generally higher in countries with high levels of e-skills, compared to countries that are still struggling with low levels of e-skills [START_REF] Chan | E-government implementation: A macro analysis of Singapore's e-government initiatives[END_REF]. Many governments have developed e-skilling initiatives for citizens to address this concern.

Citing successes in developed countries, studies on the accessibility of e-services in South Africa found that the level of ICT skills and literacy among citizens has a major role in the successful participation in e-services, by influencing the ability of citizens to access and use information [START_REF] Maumbe | Questioning the pace and pathway of egovernment development in Africa: A case study of South Africa's Cape Gateway project[END_REF][START_REF] Ngulube | The nature and accessibility of e-government in Sub Saharan Africa[END_REF].This is clear evidence of mimetic pressure at play, which in some cases including in South Africa, has influenced policy decisions.

Role of government in broadband diffusion: broadband policies, strategies, regulation and infrastructure

Governments play a major role in establishing regulative mechanisms such as policy and legislation for promoting the development of broadband for socio-economic prosperity by improving the framework conditions, stimulating demand and indirectly supporting the supply side [START_REF] Falch | Penetration of broadband services-The role of policies[END_REF]. Developed countries such as Singapore, USA and Sweden have increased broadband penetration through supportive policies that promote infrastructure development, competition and regulate the sector [START_REF] Belloc | Whither policy design for broadband penetration? Evidence from 30 OECD countries[END_REF][START_REF] Cava-Ferreruela | Broadband policy assessment: A cross-national empirical analysis[END_REF]. Here we see the use of coercive mechanisms to promote the growth of socio-economic infrastructure. Developing countries have liberalised the telecommunications sector and established independent telecommunications regulators to promote a telecommunications regulatory environment that is in line with global best practices [START_REF] Berg | Private initiatives in infrastructure: Priorities, incentives and performance Northampton[END_REF][START_REF] Jayakar | Regulatory governance in African telecommunications: Testing the resource curse hypothesis[END_REF].This is evidence of the mimetic mechanism at work where developing countries have copied developed countries in their efforts to increase broadband penetration.

4.4

Security, privacy and trust concerns in a smart society

Citizens" security and privacy concerns in the connected and smart environment are a major threat to the success of smart initiatives due to increased mistrust of smart initiatives by citizens [START_REF] Belanger | A framework for e-government: privacy implications[END_REF]. Legal and social concepts of a citizen"s ""right to privacy"" which are intertwined with the challenge of security and the benefits of smart initiatives, have posed a significant challenge for governments [START_REF] Elmaghraby | Cyber Security Challenges in Smart Cities: Safety, Security and Privacy[END_REF]. Governments have responded by developing policies, legislation and other mechanisms for addressing security, privacy and trust concerns [START_REF] Al-Omari | Building an e-Government e-trust infrastructure[END_REF]. Addressing citizens" concerns is critical in promoting citizen participation and trust in a smart society. The development of such regulative mechanisms can be viewed as governments" response to external pressures from citizens, who are one of governments" most important stakeholders.

Results

We discuss five key national projects implemented by the South African government aimed at increasing citizen connectivity to support the vision of a smart society.

Broadband implementation in South Africa: "SA Connect" project

To progress towards the goal of universal access, in 2013, South Africa launched a national broadband project "SA Connect", the country"s broadband strategy and policy. The broadband strategy and policy"s objective is to ensure affordable broadband access for all by addressing both supply-side issues such as e-readiness, skills and availability and demand side issues such as infrastructure, regulation and competition. The strategy aims to bridge the gap between the currently poor status of broadband in South Africa, and the country"s vision of a seamless network that will make broadband universally accessible at an affordable cost to all. This is an example of the use of policy as a normative mechanism in achieving desired goals by proposing amendments to the institutional framework necessary for effective regulation of an environment of open and fair competition. The four-pronged strategy includes: (i)

Digital readiness: This pillar addresses institutional, regulatory and environmental reforms necessary to create a fair and competitive environment. South Africa is multi-cultural and multi-lingual with eleven official languages which government needs to cater for. The production of content in local languages is important in ensuring that citizens can fully participate in and benefit from smart initiatives. This is important in offering equivalent services to all citizens as well as reducing long-standing hostilities perpetrated by socio-historic injustices [START_REF] Maumbe | Questioning the pace and pathway of egovernment development in Africa: A case study of South Africa's Cape Gateway project[END_REF]. Cultural and linguistic inclusivity in this case is used as a basis for achieving institutional legitimacy. We observe government"s attempt to influence desired social behaviour through e-participation as well as strategies to stimulate demand as attempts to establish social norms with the long-term goal of embedding new cultural-cognitive assumptions in South African society.

The inclusion of the informal sector and ICT entrepreneurship in the national broadband policy is of importance because the informal sector plays an important role in the South African economy. The South African economy is currently struggling to absorb college and university graduates with unemployment currently at 25% with a low absorption rate of 43.5% [START_REF][END_REF]. ICT entrepreneurship and innovation are key features of a smart and connected society [START_REF] Paskaleva | The smart city: A nexus for open innovation? Intelligent Buildings International[END_REF]. We argue that normative pressure on government to meet their social obligations has influenced government to find innovative responses in addressing some of these socio-economic challenges.

Strategic Infrastructure Projects

The Strategic Infrastructure Projects (SIPs) support government"s goals of using ICT to "underpin the development of a dynamic and connected information society that is more inclusive and prosperous" [START_REF]National Development Plan[END_REF]. SIP 15: Expanding access to communication technology aims to enhance connectivity and access to information by providing for broadband coverage to all households by 2020 [START_REF]National Infrastructure Plan[END_REF]. Despite the establishment of SIP 15, internet access is still low in South Africa with only 10.8% of the population accessing internet at home due to high costs [49]. We argue that infrastructure development alone is not sufficient in increasing citizen connectedness if it remains unaffordable. The adoption of smart technologies does not guarantee success of smart initiatives [START_REF] Nam | Smart city as urban innovation: Focusing on management, policy, and context[END_REF]. A holistic approach is needed to yield a positive result.

Smart cities initiative

The "smart cities" initiatives are part of government"s project of developing South Africa"s major cities into world class cities. The government is embarking on several national initiatives such as "e-schools" and free wireless broadband in public areas so as to support the national goal of creating a smart society. As part of their "smart cities" agendas, several cities in South Africa such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria have embarked on projects to roll out free wireless broadband in public areas to provide connectivity and access to all residents. The Gauteng provincial government"s R2-billion "paperless classrooms" project, for example, aims to provide learners in public schools with digital connectivity [START_REF]Gauteng gets paperless classrooms[END_REF]. Resources and associated activities are thus critical in realising the goal of a connected and smart citizenry.

5.4

Digital migration programme

To promote digital access to all South Africans, the government is migrating the broadcasting infrastructure from analogue to digital, a move which is key in enabling faster broadband services. To ensure inclusion of all citizens, the government will provide free set-top boxes to 5 million poor households [START_REF]Integrated ICT policy discussion paper[END_REF][START_REF] South | Digital migration policy[END_REF]. Social obligation thus plays a major role in influencing policy decisions aimed at addressing social and economic inequalities. The need for digital migration derives from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) resolution where countries were given a June 17 2015 deadline to migrate. Here we observe the role of coercive isomorphic pressure in influencing policy direction. Delays in implementation resulted in South Africa missing the deadline. Inefficiencies and a leadership crisis since the split of the former Communications Department into the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Service and Department of Communications have been cited by government leadership as some of the challenges [START_REF] South | Inquiry into the affairs of the DTPS[END_REF]. It appears that coercive isomorphic pressure is unlikely to lead to desired behaviour if not accompanied by sufficient supportive normative and cultural cognitive mechanisms such as leadership, resources and trust.

E-readiness programme (e-skills and e-literacy)

E-readiness (e-skills and e-literacy) are among the key success factors in moving towards a smart and connected society. The success of e-government in Singapore for example has been attributed to the e-readiness of its citizens among other factors [START_REF] Chan | E-government implementation: A macro analysis of Singapore's e-government initiatives[END_REF]. E-readiness enables citizens to fully leverage the benefits of a smart society as well as participate fully in smart initiatives. In recognition of the importance of e-readiness, South Africa established the Ikamva National e-Skills Institute (iNeSI) to co-ordinate the development of an e-skilled and e-empowered society and delivers on the goals of the NDP. This is a significant example of the positive role of mimetic pressure in influencing desired behaviour. Social obligation is the basis for attaining legitimacy in this instance. The implementation of e-readiness programmes for citizens, despite several strategies and initiatives put in place, have been hampered due to a fragmented approach, poor resourcing and inefficiencies in coordination. This reiterates the importance of supportive institutional mechanisms and their associated resources and activities in driving institutional priorities to achieve success and legitimacy [START_REF] Scott | Institutions and organizations[END_REF].

Discussion

Poor implementation: integrated e-strategy challenge

South Africa still lacks an integrated e-strategy to guide and coordinate the development of ICT in government, business and society [START_REF]Integrated ICT policy discussion paper[END_REF][START_REF] South | Integrated ICT policy[END_REF].This is a stumbling block in the implementation of policies geared towards developing a smart society, which require a much more coordinated approach. This has often resulted in inefficiencies due to poor coordination of institutional resources and activities and delays in implementing critical projects such as the Strategic Infrastructure and "SA Connect" projects. Poor capacity due to leadership and resource constraints in institutions tasked with the implementation of policies has compromised planning and associated activi-ties in implementation. This is a threat to government"s NDP vision of ensuring that by 2030, "A seamless information infrastructure will be universally available and accessible and will meet the needs of citizens" [START_REF] South | National broadband policy[END_REF] and prevents the NDP from being fully implemented. South Africa is failing to meet some of its short and medium term targets set out in the NDP due to poor implementation. The presence of normative and regulative institutional mechanisms such as policies and legislation are therefore not a panacea if these are not supported by effective implementation mechanisms.

The slow implementation of legislation aimed at addressing privacy and security in the "smart" era is also concerning. The Protection of Personal Information Act aimed at protecting personal information privacy came into law in 2013 but is still yet to be fully implemented. The Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Act aimed at protecting critical information infrastructure is still in draft and is yet to be finalised and implemented, leaving South Africa vulnerable to cyber-attacks that have been on the increase globally. This compromises citizens" trust of the "smart" environment because of the perception that it is intrusive to their privacy and increases security risks.

Institutional leadership challenges

Despite the existence of coercive isomorphic mechanisms such as policy and legislation, and normative mechanisms such as appeals to social justice, South Africa continues to face challenges in achieving its goal of universal access in transitioning to a smart society. The Broadband Council, composed of high level experts set up to stir broadband development, is dysfunctional and has been rocked by resignations of experts citing lack of guidance from government [START_REF] Live | Experts quit broadband council[END_REF]. A leadership challenge in the department of Telecommunications and Postal services, the department responsible for coordinating the broadband project and ICT in government, has also been a major blow. To indicate the gravity of the matter, on the 3 rd of August 2015, the Minister of Telecommunications and Postal services initiated an independent public service inquiry into the management affairs of the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services [START_REF]Integrated ICT policy discussion paper[END_REF]. Institutional mechanisms fail in the face of incompetence and self-interest, creating significant setbacks to the success of government"s vision of a smart and connected society. Such failures are likely going to lead to citizens" mistrust of government as an institution driving the smart agenda.

Socio-economic challenges

South Africa is still battling with socio-economic challenges such as poverty, inequality and high unemployment [START_REF][END_REF]. Broadband, telecommunications and connectivity tariffs remain unaffordable to most South African citizens, some of whom still lack decent housing, healthcare and clean water. Broadband connectivity is therefore the lowest priority for the majority of citizens. South Africa is described as a "dual economy" where an advanced capitalist economy co-exists with an informal traditional economy [START_REF] Maumbe | Questioning the pace and pathway of egovernment development in Africa: A case study of South Africa's Cape Gateway project[END_REF]. Despite the government making some progress in addressing poverty, social injustices and inequality, these remain significant challenges and are threatening South Africa"s successful transition towards a smart society.

Economic challenges have resulted in broadband roll-out having a lower priority as evidenced by insufficient funding. In the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) for 2015/2018, despite requesting R1.4 billion (US$95 million) for broadband rollout, the SA connect project was only allocated R739 million (US$47 million) by National Treasury. This figure falls short of requested funds and casts a shadow of doubt on South Africa"s ability to reach its target of 100% broadband connectivity by 2020. Resourcing thus remains important in supporting other institutional mechanisms and activities in implementation of policy, without which implementation is bound to be compromised.

Infrastructure roll-out challenges

Infrastructure roll-out has largely been biased towards urban areas where citizens are already economically advantaged compared to their rural counterparts. Even within cities, the focus has been on wealthier suburbs. This is despite the fact that policy clearly prioritises rural areas in infrastructure roll out. Social obligation in this instance is seen as having a profound influence in policy decision making but there is less evidence of such in implementation. This has the potential to increase inequalities by widening the digital divide and is a threat to achieving the national vision of smart society as access and connectivity remain low in marginalised areas. Several metropolitan cities in South Africa (including Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town) are already enjoying free wifi rollout in public places and in some public schools. Rural areas are not developing at the same pace as South Africa"s major cities .This is concerning considering an estimated 40% of the population lives in rural areas [START_REF]National Development Plan[END_REF].

Conclusions

South Africa has made some progress in transitioning towards a smart society through a connected and smart citizenry. Government has played a significant role by developing an enabling policy framework, implementing regulative and normative measures such as the broadband project and e-readiness programmes. Poor leadership, socio-economic barriers such as affordability and the slow and poor implementation of policy and programmes are some of the barriers discussed. Government efforts are at times uncoordinated and fragmented, hence threatening the success of smart initiatives. The slow pace of development in rural and poor areas will further increase the connectivity divide. This has compromised government"s efforts in realising its vision of a smart society through the provision of a smart and seamless information infrastructure. What is clear is that policy alone is not sufficient if not supported by a strong implementation plan and other appropriate institutional mechanisms such as leadership to direct resources and activities in the institution. We also observed the influence of mimetic and coercive pressure in policy direction in South Africa, where the international community has directed best practice and policy decisions. The socio-cultural, socio-economic and socio-historic contexts in developing countries like South Africa however make it impractical to follow these so called "best practices". Governments often find themselves doing a balancing act between domestic priorities and international best practices in policy and governance. This may lead to poor conceptualisation and implementation of policy.

  (ii) Digital development: The focus is the smart procurement of quality infrastructure and services in order to address public sector broadband demand. (iii) Digital future: The focus is on the introduction of an open access wireless broadband network and wholesale fibre through public-private partnerships. (iv) Digital opportunity: The focus is on e-readiness programmes, development of local content and ICT entrepreneurship as strategies to stimulate demand.

Table 1 . E-government and ICT Policy Framework South Africa

 1

	Policy / Strategy		Key elements
	Digital migration	The Policy seeks to enable South Africa to emerge as a global leader in harnessing
	policy (2008)		ICTs for socio-economic development.
	National Devel-	A long term strategic plan for South Africa which provides a broad strategic frame-
	opment Plan (2012)	work to guide key choices and actions including the development of e-government.
	National	Infra-
	structure Plan (2012)


Matthias Steinbauer

Markus Hiesmair
email: markus.hiesmair@tk.jku.atmatthias.steinbauer

Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis

Making Computers Understand Coalition and Opposition in Parliamentary Democracy

Keywords: Data Visualisation, Open Data, Network Analytics

In recent years a tremendous raise in the establishment of Open Data initiatives can be observed, aiming at more transparency in government and public institutions. One facet of this trend are data from legislative bodies, including records and archived transcripts of plenary sessions as a measure of transparency and accountability. In this paper the system design and a prototypical implementation of an information system that makes use of these data is presented. From session transcripts naive metrics such as when and how often representatives participate in political discourse but also network metrics as in with whom representatives engage in consenting and opposing discourse can be derived. The objective of the system is to make those relationships visible and accessible to the user in an intuitive way. The system neither can nor attempts to interpret the data, this is left to the user. This paper discusses how data analytics, data visualisation, and network analytics can be facilitated to make the transcripts of legislative bodies more accessible for this purpose. The findings are underpinned by first observations over a proof-of-concept prototype which exploits data available from the Austrian parliament.

Introduction

Technological, political, and sociological developments in recent years are leading to a situation where public bodies, governments, but also many other organisation with extensive influence on the general public aim for higher transparency in their management. In democracy a certain degree of transparency is achieved by making the legislative process public and in other bodies key data is made available to the public through Open Data platforms.

A tool for larger transparency in parliamentary democracy are the transcripts of debates in the different legislative bodies. These transcripts are created during debates by stenotypists, are then typeset and published as continuous volumes. Depending on the country these volumes are distributed to policy makers and subscribers via mail, and are available for reading in libraries. Today many legislative bodies provide such debate transcripts as part of their Open Data initiatives.

Although this already allows very detailed and good insight into the democratic decision making process the transcripts bear some detriments. First of all the sheer volume of text and data found in these transcripts makes it time consuming to analyse the political discourse such that the general public needs to rely on more condensed information formats as provided by daily political news papers and news shows. Direct analysis of the transcripts remains in the domain of professionals such as political analysts, researchers, and journalists.

Further, also professionals might find it hard to analyse simple metrics in the given data. The extraction of information interesting to the general public, such as how often their elected representatives engage in discussions and which political positions they take, will often require manual analysis of large volumes of transcripts.

Finally, from the mere text interesting structures in the political landscape are hard to observe. Revealing the structure of the political discussion and finding links between individual policymakers would usually require analysts with informed background.

In the given work the authors claim that by lending methodologies from automated information extraction, data modelling, and graph analytics one is able to generate structured data about the political discourse in parliamentary democracy. The structured data allows to objectively compute metrics over the observed system and by creating agreeable visualisation allows clear insight into the political system for the general public.

It is believed that by employing a process which (1) continuously retrieves transcripts from a legislative body, [START_REF] Krumboltz | The Splitting of the Senate (Now in Convenient GIF Form)[END_REF] extracts the relationships between actors in the discourse, and (3) visualizes the results, an important contribution to political transparency can be made. Politically interested are able to make more informed decisions. These will still be base based on information as received through media, however, arguments can be questioned and verified in the available data.

A public software system that follows the process described above can provide simple metrics on the members of political parties and the participants of political discourse. The system can provide data on how often individual members attended sittings of a council, and if attended how actively they took part in discussions.

Through taking part in discussions policymakers induce relationships. These relationships can be tracked in a network (sociogram) which can be modelled as a temporal graph. By visualizing this graph relationships between politicians and political parties become visible, groups of politicians (supposeably with similar attitudes) can be found, and formal groups (parties, coalition, and opposition) can be analysed for their homogeneity.

Future legislative periods in democratic systems might become rateable; the electorate might assess the performance of the delegates through political perfor-mance indicators just as companies now use key performance indicators in their informed decisions. With mathematical models and machine learning approaches it might even be possible to make predictions.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2 inspiring work from automated analytics of political systems and relevant foundational material from the relevant fields such as information retrieval and temporal graph analytics is discussed. Section 3 discusses the system design of a software system as proposed in this work, and section 4 presents a real-world prototypical implementation in greater detail. In section 5 the use of the system on the example of the Austrian parliament and first observations are presented. Finally section 6 provides pointers towards future work and concludes the paper.

Related Work

The analysis of political debate and reflection upon the performance of public bodies are key tasks of political science and social sciences. Traditionally these sciences afford high expert involvement. Manual review of literature, transcripts, and datasets are often used as methods.

Recent progress in computer science, the boom of the social web, and transparency efforts towards Open Data lead to a spiked interest in political analysis from other fields of research such as computer science. Ultimately nurturing efforts towards automated analytics of political structures starting with pure lexical analysis of political debate [START_REF] Bara | Analysing Parliamentary Debate with Computer Assistance[END_REF] and stopping at structural analytics of Big Data resources [START_REF] Sudhara | Automated Analysis of the US Presidental Elections using Big Data and Network Analysis[END_REF].

Open Data

Open Data in the context of public bodies is defined as data which is nonprivacy-restricted and non-confidential that was generated with public money. It becomes Open Data when made available without any restrictions on its usage or distribution. It is assumed that Open Data closes gaps between public organisations and citizens thus nurturing discourses and the exchange between public bodies and citizens is seen as constructive. Open Data can coarsely be categorized into political and social data, economic data, and operational and technical data [START_REF] Janssen | Benefits, Adoption Barriers and Myths of Open Data and Open Government[END_REF]. The data used in this paper falls into the first category.

Although governments worldwide are at different levels of installing Open Data initiatives some early adopters can already look back at a history and lessons learned from Open Data. For instance Shadbolt et al. [START_REF] Shadbolt | Linked Open Government Data: Lessons from Data[END_REF] are able to reflect on the benefits gained from the linked open government data platform http://data.gov.uk installed in the United Kingdom. As an important finding it becomes clear that the state transforms to a service provider. The vision of an Internet of linked open data and thus also linked open government data makes us believe that systems such as the one described in this paper will become easy to implement in the future.

The Social Web

However, not only official state bodies provide political analytics with data. Also a vast amount of services which invite their users to social interaction form another pool of information. In general social networks, their structure and especially information diffusion are topics which are very well studied [START_REF] Guille | Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks: A Survey[END_REF]. In the context of this paper political discourse in online social networks are of particular interest.

Exemplary studies that address political discourse on the popular sites Twitter and Facebook are given in [START_REF] Hsu | Political Discourse Among Key Twitter Users: The Case of Sejong City in South Korea[END_REF][START_REF] Kushin | Getting Political on Social Network Sites: Exploring Online Political Discourse on Facebook[END_REF]. In Hsu et al. the micro-blogging service Twitter was used to scrape information on a distinct political topic in South Korea. The study shows that a limited number of opinion leaders are the main drivers in the political discussion around this topic. This is clear through the fact that thousands of users interact with the artefacts on the site which were created by the opinion leaders. From the 20 identified key users several results were derived. (1) The users were categorized and some of the most popular key users refer to large Korean media outlets which are already opinion leaders in other media (print, TV, radio broadcast, etc.). ( 2) Central keywords were derived from the discourse and clusters were derived from them such that the political position of the key users becomes visible. (3) Finally, the keyword clusters and key users were visualized as network diagrams such that the links between them become visible [START_REF] Hsu | Political Discourse Among Key Twitter Users: The Case of Sejong City in South Korea[END_REF].

In contrast Kushin et al. discuss the computer mediated communication possible in online social networks. These systems have been criticised for isolating disagreeing persons from engaging in discussions and for fostering atmosphere of uncivil behavior due to a perceived feeling of anonymity and distance between the actors. Although political discussions on the web have been taking place since the very beginning of the public Internet and thus also the analysis of it is a long standing topic of interest, systems such as Facebook allow for deeper insight. Whereas in the past discussions where scattered over many different platforms such as web forums and Usenet groups some of which accessible only to a technically proficient audience, now systems like Facebook and Twitter are used by a wide demographic. In online social networks different aspects of political engagement are possible and according to Kushin et al. will lead to different reactions. Users can be-friend politicians, can express their interest in political content posted on sites, and can directly comment on political content posted by other users.

Structural Analytics

In fall 2013 Renzo Luicioni created several graph visualisations that highlight voting relationships between US senators from the 101st congress throughout the 113th congress [START_REF] Lucioni | Senate Voting Relationships. Private Blog[END_REF]. The data was scraped from GovTrack.us [START_REF] Govtrack | Civic Impulse LCC[END_REF] converted to graph structures which were then automatically layouted by an implementation of the ForceAtlas algorithm [START_REF] Jacomy | ForceAtlas2, A Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization[END_REF] as found in the Gephi graph visualisation workbench. The results impressively document how the political landscape in the US morphed from a collaborating scene towards a polarized political landscape. In the recent visualisations one can get the impression that the two major forces (Democrats, and Republicans) are almost dictating the voting schemes. The work of Luicioni was picked up by Yahoo News [START_REF] Krumboltz | The Splitting of the Senate (Now in Convenient GIF Form)[END_REF] and since it spiked large interest was later featured in a short piece in The Economist [3].

Although the work of Luicioni gained much public attention there has been earlier work in the field of structural analysis of political networks. Naturally the field of graph analytics has interest in this area. Well known metrics such as centrality measures, graph partitioning, graph clustering can also be applied on political networks. In 2005 Porter et al. [START_REF] Mason | A network analysis of committees in the U.S. House of Representatives[END_REF] were able to successfully demonstrate the application of graph clustering algorithms on data originating from the U.S. house of representatives. The outcome of their studies are dendrograms representing the hierarchical structure of the different communities within the political bodies. Their results also underpin the visual results of Luicioni as the clusters in their data show a high degree of separation.

Based on the findings of Porter et al., Amelio and Pizzuti [START_REF] Amelio | Analyzing Voting Behavior in Italian Parliament: Group Cohesion and Evolution[END_REF] studied the voting behavior in the Italian parliament. In the first part of their study similar results are presented. Also the Italian parliament shows community structure which can be broken down into a dendrogram. However, further metrics such as the cohesion of political parties and the similarity in voting behavior were analysed. An interesting finding was that the cohesion within the governing parties decreased in relevant time-spans of the observed dataset. On the other hand cohesion within opposition increased. Ultimately the political landscape changed and government was not reelected. This leaves room for the interpretation that future automatic analytics systems might predict probabilities of government reelection.

Where the previously mentioned related work base their analysis on structured data of political systems, the work of [START_REF] Sudhara | Automated Analysis of the US Presidental Elections using Big Data and Network Analysis[END_REF] works in a larger context. The described software pipeline is able to detect election-related articles in large corpora of news articles and political information systems, parses them. After parsing key actors, objects, and actions are identified and used to form a network structure of political key players and topics.

System Design

In the following the overall system design of the analysis platform is discussed. The system lends its general processing structure from the well known ETL (extract, transform, load) steps as found in business intelligence applications. The ETL process is then continued by a processing and visualisation step. The process is outlined in figure 1.

The phase Extract is responsible to retrieve relevant data from a data source such as an Open Data repository. Depending on the actual implementation of the repository a variety of different methods can be used. For instance many large public bodies are starting to adopt data platforms such as CKAN Also the Transform phase has a tight binding on the actual data source. Data about political debate is available in many different formats. For instance the transcripts of the Austrian parliament are available as HTML and PDF documents2 , the Italian parliament provides structured voting records on their site3 , and for the US the site govtrack.us4 provides structured data and full text from many governmental bodies.

Observing the landscape of data sources it becomes clear that the two databound phases (Extract and Transform marked in grey) need to be adapted to specific data providers. However, for all of the resources it is possible to transform them into a set of structured data which contains representatives, and their voting and discourse patterns. This structured data is the input for the Load phase which uses the structured data and loads them to a query-able data repository such as a relational database management system. The Load phase reads input data in a generic data-format or through standardised APIs such that a general implementation of this phase can be used regardless the data-source.

On top of the loaded data model typical data analysis tasks can be run. Such as computing relevant metrics in the Process, and creating human-readable interpretations of the data in the Visualize phase. Metrics computed over the available data can be roughly discriminated into two groups. The first group are metrics that provide simple indicators over records found in the datasets. Exemplary indicators in this group for individual politicians are: the total number of years the representative is in service, degree of attendance in sessions, number of speeches and interactions in the plenary. We call these indicators naive indicators or metrics.

Further more complex indicators can be derived from the interaction network that is formed by representatives engaging in discussions with each other. Network metrics such as the node centrality, and betweenness centrality can be used to determine which actors are at the core of groups or who acts as a hub between individual groups. Further, methods from community detection can be applied to reveal the groups that form within the network. These are of partic-ular interest if compared to formal groups that are expected to be found in the network such as coalition, opposition, and political parties.

Depending whether naive or network metrics are of interest different tactics can be applied to visualize the data for the user. Naive metrics can mostly be reflected through the use of standard charts such as bar-charts or scatterplots. The network data can be visualized through automatically layouted graph representations. Additional information in this case must be color coded.

As the process described above is designed to be fully automated it can be repeated on a regular basis. This leads to a system that is constantly fed with current information and allows the creation of a user-facing dashboard that can be used to analyse the current but also past situations.

The current landscape of Open Data in combination with the ETL and processing steps described above and the use of methods from graph analytics allows the creation of a prototype system that gives a first impression as of how in future the insight into public bodies can be significantly improved.

Proof-of-Concept Prototype

To demonstrate the mere technical feasibility of our approach and to allow first usability tests with focus groups, a proof of concept prototype for the presented system design was created. In this first prototype openly available data from the Austrian parliament, was used. The prototype uses politician profiles and transcripts of the sessions of the national council which are both publicly available as HTML files. With these data sources, general data of politicians (birth date, ...), their membership in political parties and their activities and absences during sessions of the national council can be derived. Furthermore, relations among politicians and parties can be calculated through meta data of the speeches held in the parliament.

An important aspect while building the prototype was extendibility, especially the Extract and Transform phase of the processing pipeline must be adaptable. The prototype was built for the national council of the Austrian parliament, but in general the system has been held modular and therefore legislative systems of other countries can be targeted as well, if the data is available in sufficient quality and of an overall similar structure.

The prototype was implemented with state of the art Java and Spring standard frameworks and consists of the following modules:

Extractor: Loads the raw HTML-Files from the Data Source (in our case the Austrian Parliament Web Site). The data-source provides an RSS feed which can be used to get up-to-date information. Transformer: Downloaded HTML files are parsed in the transformer module.

Depending on the input file different output is generated. From politician profiles the parser is able to derive a structured profile, from session transcripts the parser finds votes and debates and assigns politician profiles to the actors.

Loader: Loads the data-source independent records provided from the transformer into a relational database system. Analyzer: Calculates basic measures and generates the relation graphs for politicians and parties. The relationship graph is built by analysing how politicians expressed sentiment towards topics discussed in the plenary. For the dataset used vast amounts of speeches and contributions from the auditorium are marked pro and contra arguments. The normalized edge weight of relationships between actors is used to express the overall pro and contra disposition between any two actors. Community Detector: Automatically detects communities in the relation graph using a label propagation algorithm [START_REF] Raghavan | Near linear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale networks[END_REF]. The algorithm can be configured to consider only edges in a certain weight-range such that more global or local communities can be found. Web Visualization: Contains mainly the user interface which presents the computed metrics and provides graph visualisation.

As intended by the system design other legislative systems can be connected through replacing the extractor-and transformer-module with implementations for the respective data source. All other modules will work for other systems without the need for a change.

The real world implementation of the prototype is available as open source software. The code can be found online at Github5 . Screenshot in figure 2a gives a first impression for the graphical representation of a legislative period. It gives rough overviews on session meta-data and highlights some of the naive metrics. Interested users can drill down for instance to politician profiles as presented in figure 2b. The profile puts the selected politician in context with other politicians in the legislative body. Graph visualisation is discussed in the next section. During the course of creating the prototypical implementation for the political information system presented in this paper it became clear semi-automated and automated analysis of legislative bodies is already technically feasible. Open Data platforms provide the required data which can easily be processed and analysed with state of the art methods from data analytics, data visualisation and in this case also network analytics.

As for our showcase scenario we can also report that the data extraction process from text / HTML based transcripts works surprisingly well. Since in the showcase in-depth profiles from politicians are available actors in the transcripts can be looked up in an index which leads to a completely correct mapping of actor names to politician profiles in the observed dataset. Obviously over the years the formatting of the transcripts continuously improved such that parsing mechanisms need to adapt as well. In the observed dataset there is one major technology change. Old versions of the transcripts are actually scanned text documents instead of HTML. If these were to be analysed optical character recognition techniques would be required. For transcripts from other legislative bodies also some annotations such as the pro/contra indicators found for the Austrian parliament might be missing. In this case advanced methods from text processing such as automated sentiment analysis will be required.

Already the naive metrics presented in period overviews and politician profiles provide interesting insight. However, politician interaction network graphs as presented in figure 4 provide even deeper insight. The graphs have been automatically layouted by a force driven layout algorithm [START_REF] Jacomy | ForceAtlas2, A Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization[END_REF]. The algorithm in general tries to place nodes as far apart as possible, however the weighted edges create a opposing pull force. This leads to a layout process where politician profiles with similar attitudes get pulled close together and opposing attitudes drawn apart. In the output it is clearly shown that the network is clustered.

In figure 4 the periods 22 and 25 were chosen on purpose because these two graphs both show two clearly distinct clusters. In both visualisations the left cluster is formed by profiles in the coalition government and the right cluster contains profiles from the oppositions parties. In the 25 th period we can see that in the opposition the green nodes (profiles from the Austrian Greens) are a little closer to the government than the blue nodes (Freedom Party of Austria). In general the nodes in the opposition cluster are less densely layouted than in the coalition government. This is conform with the opposing political agenda of the opposition parties. In the 22 nd period however a different coalition government was formed (black, blue, and orange nodes). Again one can observe two clearly distinct clusters, however both clusters are far more dense.

The very same clusters are detected by the community detection algorithm chosen in our experiments [START_REF] Raghavan | Near linear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale networks[END_REF]. The community detection algorithm was run exemplary on periods 20 through 25 of the dataset and the community labels assigned to the individual political profiles were compared with the official politician profiles. The algorithm in [START_REF] Raghavan | Near linear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale networks[END_REF] describes an iterative process, in our experiments ten iterations led to stable communities. Further a threshold for edge se-lection was used such that only edges with an absolute edge-weight above 3 were considered during community detection. This number was determined throughout multiple experiment runs and is a parameter which most likely needs to be adjusted for other datasets. Most of the Austrian representatives are organised in clubs such that it is save to assume that a politician who is a member of a governing party is part of the government. However, there are rare cases where politicians change clubs and thus move from government to opposition during a period. The chart in figure 3 shows that in worst case the community detection algorithm assigned more than 91% of the profiles to the correct group but on average (98%) it is doing far better. In this paper the rationale behind and the necessary steps for building an online system that allows network analysis on top of parliamentary political discourse were presented. It is highlighted how such systems may contribute to more transparent policy making in the future by allowing laymen to visualise and analyse interlinks between political figures and topics. The architecture of a computer system was presented that allows for automatic information retrieval from relevant Open Data repositories, the parsing and conversion of the data into network data, and allows the application of methods from graph theory and graph visualisation in final analysis steps. The mere technical feasibility of the architecture was demonstrated by implementing an Open Source prototype of this architecture and its practical feasibility was demonstrated by putting the system in use with data scraped from the transcripts available at the Open Data repository of the Austrian parliament. The presented approach, the architecture, and the resulting software system are work in progress. In future work the presented system can be extended in multiple ways. (1) With the continuous trend towards Open Data hopefully future transcripts of parliamentary discourse are already pre-annotated such that a higher data quality can be reached and errors in the loading process can be reduced to a minimum. [START_REF] Krumboltz | The Splitting of the Senate (Now in Convenient GIF Form)[END_REF] The presented software prototype and its analysis mechanisms are just the tip of the iceberg of which would be possible in the future. Users could enter the system through different analytics paths such as looking up all contributions to discourse of politicians, browsing through topics and finding relevant key players, and cross-referencing the official political discourse with material found in mass-media. Further, more metrics such as the automatic estimation cohesion and clout seem logical next steps, however, would require input and verification from other disciplines.

Although studies of various political institutions exist from the U.S. and Europe this is the first approach to build a generic framework that allows to import data from different countries. In future iterations it is believed that an application framework like the presented can be used to compare political bodies of different countries. This is also the first study that applies network analysis over data provided by the Austrian parliament.

Due to online social networks that allow direct political discourse among citizens, the trend towards Open Data, and systems like the presented that make use of the available data, future citizens have powerful tools at hand that shed clear light into the decision making process of governmental bodies.

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: General structure of the processing pipeline

Fig. 2 :

 2 Fig. 2: Prototype screenshots

Fig. 3 :

 3 Fig. 3: % of correctly assigned profiles

Fig. 4 :

 4 Fig. 4: Politician relation graphs

  1 which

	Extract	Transform	Load	Process	Visualize

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN): http://ckan.org

Austrian Parliament Session Transcripts: https://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/STPROT/

Italian Parliament Open Data: http://parlamento17.openpolis.it

govtrack.us: https://www.govtrack.us

Austrian Parliament Analyzer https://github.com/hias234/AustrianParliamentAnalyzer