Ordinary people-extraordinary projects! from big data to knowledge in stakeholder management for construction megaprojects

Decision making for modern infrastructure megaprojects is involved in a complex interaction among all social organizations which are necessary to complete functionality of the system and influence its performance. Public communities in such a scenario cannot be considered a background noise anymore, and decision makers have to involve their vested interests more directly. Decision making would then be a networked process towards a consensus on different aspects of the project. In order to address the dependency on public community impacts, traditionally re-active Public Involvement practices are evolving to more proactive methods through communication channels available by the Social Web. Formation and evolution of discussion networks around civil infrastructure projects (referred to as Infrastructure Discussion Network-IDN) have been studied by the authors in previous works. This paper suggests a framework to evaluate stakeholders' impact on infrastructure megaprojects through analysis of big data captured from online social media. For this purpose, influence level, interest, and position of internal and external stakeholders involved in IDNs are evaluated via social network analytics and semantic methods. The results can be combined to form stakeholder's impact and aggregated over all ideas posted online to give a complete view of stakeholders' position/impact on the infrastructure megaproject.