Transforming government agencies’ approach to eParticipation through multiple social media exploitation

Abstract

The emergence of Web 2.0 social media offers big opportunities for widening and enhancing e-participation in government agencies’ decision and policy making processes. However, it is necessary to conduct extensive research in order to develop advanced methodologies and practices of social media exploitation in government for the above purposes. This chapter contributes in this direction by presenting a methodology for the efficient exploitation of multiple Web 2.0 social media by government agencies in order to broaden and enhance e-participation. It is based on a central platform which enables posting content and deploying micro web applications (‘Policy Gadgets’-Padgets) to multiple popular Web 2.0 social media, and also collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings) in an efficient manner using their application programming interfaces (API). These interaction data undergo various levels of processing, such as calculation of useful analytics, opinion mining and simulation modelling, in order to provide effective support to public decision and policy makers. A first evaluation of the proposed methodology in a series of pilot applications gave positive results as to its capabilities and value, and at the same time revealed some critical preconditions for its successful application.