PyLadiesCon 2024

Leveraging Python for Community Policy Evaluation in Taiwan
2024-12-07 , Main Stream
Language: English

In today's digital era, policy discussions within communities are becoming increasingly frequent, raising the question of how to effectively analyze and apply these discussions to support decision-making. This sharing proposes a simple and sustainable text analysis framework based on Python, designed to help community members and policymakers extract valuable insights from discussion data. The proposed framework integrates text mining techniques and sentiment analysis, and dynamic dashboards, utilizing methods such as topic modeling and text similarity calculations to automatically identify key topics, sentiment trends, and similar suggestions within discussions.

While still in development, this project emphasizes the sustainability of the approach. Leveraging Python's open-source tools and libraries, I hope to provide a modular analysis process that allows users of varying technical backgrounds to quickly adopt and apply it flexibly to various community policy discussion contexts, and help enable community members to engage more effectively and influence policy decisions.

As this project is in its early stages, ongoing efforts focus on refining the methodology and validating its applicability in real-world scenarios. The potential applications combine policy analysis with data science methodologies.


In Taiwan, every summer, government agencies designate a major theme and invite young people to form teams and propose deliberative democracy discussion activities. Each year, there are over 30 such discussions. For each session, reading materials are prepared on the topic, and a final conclusion report is presented. How can these be utilized in policy-making? How can qualitative discussions be quantified to enhance the effectiveness of discussion results? Python offers numerous open-source packages and tools that are well-suited for civic tech applications, improving the quality of civic discussions and policy decisions.

PyLadies is a community where we experience support and empowerment. I hope to extend Python's reach and our community's resilience through this platform, empowering more citizens and issue advocates.

An evidence-based, customer-centric, and deliberative strategist with lean agility and pragmatism. Driving data insights, agile innovation, and resilient communities in a VUCA world.