Gran Scala

Gran Scala project under the microscope of social-networking, e-cognocracy & e-participation

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Five Spanish universities develop a multidisciplinary e-participation project

This research project has set up an experiment that aims to thoroughly examine the mechanisms referred to as electronic democracy

The Validation and Business Applications Group (VAI), based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (FIUPM) and led by Jesús Cardeñosa, this week joined the multidisciplinary E-participation, Security and Knowledge Democratization project, together with another four Spanish universities.

The project is the result of six years of research in the fields of electronic government, e-democracy and e-cognocracy by the Zaragoza Multicriteria Decision Making Group, GDMZ, based at the Universidad de Zaragoza. A total of 29 professors from 12 different research groups and 10 areas of expertise are participating in the project led by Prof. José María Moreno Jiménez.

This research project has set up an experiment that aims to thoroughly examine the mechanisms referred to as electronic democracy, meaning Internet-mediated democracy and social networking and the social uses of information technologies.

Specifically, the project aims to implement an intelligent system that will be able to identify the opinions of university students from the remarks they make about Gran Scala being sited in Los Monegros, Aragon.

Gran Escala under the microscope:

The experiment bears the same name as the private initiative promoted primarily by US casinos: Gran Scala. Through the experiment, the team of researchers aims to elicit the opinion of Multicriteria Decision and Operational Research students at the Universidad de Zaragoza’s School of Economics about the immense tourism project being sited in the district of Los Monegros.

Gran Scala will be the biggest ever European leisure complex. The figures are astronomical: 17,000 million euros in investment, and 1,000 million in State and 677 million in Aragon Regional Government revenues through taxation. Gran Scala is expected to receive 25 million visitors per year, create 65,000 direct and indirect jobs at its 70 hotels, 32 casinos, five theme parks, museums, golf courses and racetracks. The new space would be equivalent to a town with a population of 100,000.

Opinion over the Internet

To find out what students think about this project, the GMDZ set up a website, only accessible by administrators and the student sample selected to give their opinion. This is the basis of the experiment.

Through the website students can express their opinion about the pros and cons of the Gran Scala project, as well as vote on four fields: benefits (short-term benefits), costs (short-term negative effects), opportunities (long-term benefits) and risks (long-term negative effects).

The system uses the votes to build a group representation. Administrators will examine this representation to get a detailed picture of the mood of university students’ opinion about the Gran Scala project. Lee más »

marzo 25, 2008 Publicado por Granscalina | *Viva Gran Scala, English | Aragon, democracy, e-cognocracy, e-participation, economics, electronic democracy, electronic government, FIUPM, GMDZ, gran escala, Gran Scala, gran scala spain, granscala, internet, Jesús Cardeñosa, José María Moreno Jiménez, million, Monegros, networking, project, Social, Social Networking, Spain, Spain Gran Scala, tourism, Universidad, University, UNIZAR, VAI, wikinomics, Zaragoza | 2 comentarios