Research indicates that evidence-based policy making is most successful when public administrators refer to diversified information portfolios. With the rising prominence of social media in the last decade, this paper argues that governments can benefit from integrating this publically available, user-generated data through the technique of social media analytics (SMA). There are already several initiatives set up to predict future policy issues, e.g. for the policy fields of crisis mitigation or migrant integration insights. The authors analyse these endeavours and their potential for providing more efficient and effective public policies. Furthermore, they scrutinise the challenges to governmental SMA usage in particular with regards to legal and ethical aspects. Reflecting the latter, this paper provides forward-looking recommendations on how these technologies can best be used for future policy making in a legally and ethically sound manner.

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The term "smart city" has been strongly promoted since the late 1990s, yet its concrete meaning remains blurry. In this article, we shed light on two elements that many “smart cities” claim to pursue: open data and collaborative/participatory governance. Notably, we investigate whether smart city models that are based on an open data approach constitute a suitable environment for collaborative governance processes. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive model of collaborative governance which allows us to derive theoretical assumptions regarding the influence of open data on collaborative processes in a smart city context. Based on a case study model, we try to find empirical evidence for our assumptions in three cities. However, only minor evidence for an existing influence can be found, which we explain with insufficient understanding about the potentials of open data and therefore lacking strategies how to use them for fostering collaborative processes.