Evaluating a passive social media citizensourcing innovation

Abstract

Governments initially used social media mainly in order to disseminate information to the public about their activities, services, policies and plans. Then they started using social media also in order to collect from citizens useful information, knowledge, opinions and ideas concerning the problems and needs of modern societies and more recently in order to apply crowdsourcing ideas in the public sector context and promote ‘citizensourcing’. In this direction governments first used their own accounts in various social media, in which they provide information about specific problems and policies, and solicit citizens’ feedback on them (active citizensourcing). Recently, they attempt to take advantage of the extensive public policy related content developed beyond their own social media accounts, in various political forums, blogs, news websites, and SM accounts, by the citizens, without any stimulation (passive citizensourcing). These constitute significant innovations in policy formulation– citizens communication processes and practices of government. Therefore it is important to evaluate them from various perspectives, in order to learn from them as much as possible, identify and address their weaknesses, make the required improvements, and in general achieve higher levels of effectiveness and maturity of these highly innovative practices. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction: initially it develops a framework for evaluating such citizensourcing innovations based on the passive social media monitoring; and then it uses this framework for the evaluation of three pilot applications of a novel method of government passive citizensourcing through social media monitoring, which has been developed as part of an international research project.