Beyond Financial Support: Helping Citizens in Welfare Programs

Abstract

Governments are turning to Social Media as a way to engage citizens in public policies through online debates and discussion forums. Together with the communication team of a government department, we are exploring another facet of government-citizens communication, and another opportunity for governments to exploit Social Media. In particular, we are investigating whether online communities could become a new channel to support specific groups of citizens. In this model, a government would facilitate the creation of online communities for specific cohorts of people sharing goals and needs as well as act as mediator. This model would enable governments to capitalise on the power of crowd-sourcing and the social capital that gets created through such communities to provide social and emotional peer-support. These communities would also serve to provide direct feedback on social security policies. We propose to explore the issues that arise in this context.