This article covers our findings on information behavior and dissemination of parliamentary decision-makers in terms of using Social Networking Sites like Facebook. The article investigates why politicians use those technologies and integrate them more and more in their everyday workflow. In addition to the purpose of social network usage, the focus of our paper is also on best practices and how to deal with challenges like authenticity of politicians’ online profiles. The results presented within the remit of this paper are the outcome of 16 semi-structured interviews that took place as part of an evaluation effort within the EU research project WeGov [1]. The overall aim of the project is to develop a toolbox that enriches the dialogue between citizens and politicians on the web.
We describe the issues arising from the initial specification of a web-based toolkit that comprises different types of information retrieval and analysis tools. It is specifically intended for policy makers in governmental and legislative institutions, to help them research subjects of a policy in question, but the tool is general in its nature and could be applied to other domains. The major focus of this paper concerns issues arising from the initial requirements gathering for the toolkit, by consultation with its target user community. Sifting through a deluge of information available in the Internet and whether search results can be trusted are key important themes. There is also the challenge of "unknown unknowns" -relevant information exists that the policy maker simply does not know about, so there is no way of even beginning to search for it. The paper discusses how these challenges can be met.
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