FAQ: frequently asked questions

Description:
A ‘tree’ of questions and answers that can be searched using keywords or by inputting a question or statement.

eParticipation areas:

• Information Provision

Stage policy cycle: Relevant to all stages where stakeholders need to be informed about policy issues. Particularly useful where there have been a large number of existing queries about the issue.


Specials:
FAQs on their own are usually not sufficient to communicate the relevance of a complex issue. A secondary navigation system can be provided to navigate through logical sub-groups in long lists of FAQs.


Channel:
Mainly used with PCs but can also be accessed with mobile phones, if the user interface is suitable.

Technology:

• Natural language processing (NLP)
• Web application

Evaluation:
Could include a short exit questionnaire asking if answer was found, how easily and if level of detail in the answer was sufficient. Also could use accepted measures of information retrieval performance, such as ‘recall’, ‘precision’ and ‘mean reciprocal rank’.

Additions:
www.faqs.org/faqs/ www.parliament.uk/faq/faq.cfm