Engaging Politicians with Citizens on Social Networking Sites

Abstract

Governmental policy makers can use social networking sites to better engage with citizens. On the one hand social networking sites are well accepted by citizens and a familiar environment where discussions are already taking place and social networking sites are also more important for politicians. Thus, a need for information retrieval (the policy maker gathering information), dissemination (the policy maker broadcasting information) and two-way dialog between the policy maker and citizens over these platforms. The idea is to connect both the policy makers and the citizens. In fact social media is a mass medium and it’s difficult to sieve through multitudes of comments to get to the crux of a debate. The authors’ approach to address this is to use automatic analysis components to summarise and categorize text. To be able to place successful tools that can be used in the policy maker’s everyday life within the design process is important. This paper describes the phase of combining the policy makers’ requirements with the technical feasibility to develop a software prototype, where the analysis tools can be validated within the domain of policy makers and policymaking. This paper sets up the environment for evaluating this approach and to address the question of usefulness with respect to a dialogue with citizens.

Features of Data Analytic Models Supporting Social Media Analysis toward Policy Modeling

“…The user activity analysis component, which can predict which posts are going to generate more attention. And, user behavior analysis component which classifies users according to their behavior and interactions within the social network sites [34]. Furthermore, WeGov developed two major tools for data analysis; Content and User analysis which can distinguish the users who are most active than the others, which is important especially for policy makers since they can focus their attention on those users who have a higher potential to influence and affect the public opinion.…”

Online Forums vs. Social Networks: Two Case Studies to Support eGovernment with Topic Opinion Analysis

“…• We have adopted a methodical approach for the development process of the toolbox with frequent and iterative end user engagement, such as the German Parliament, the German State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia, the EC Parliament, city administrations, parties and NGOs [9] so as to get requirements and feedback on the toolbox's functions and usability [4]. As part of user engagement, a number of use cases were designed [16] showing how the toolbox analysis tools could provide a two-way dialogue with citizens, and the work reported here develops one of these use cases.…”

Leveraging European Union Policy Community through Advanced Exploitation of Social Media

“…Though the history of social media exploitation in government is not long, there has been a rapid evolution in the relevant practices, so that we can distinguish some discrete 'generations' in them, which are outlined in the following section 2. The first generation of social media exploitation in government was based on the manual operation of accounts in some social media, while the subsequent generations adopted more automated approaches exploiting the application programming interfaces (API) of the targeted social media [6][7][8][9][10][11]. However, all previous generations share a common characteristic: they were oriented towards the general public, and did not target any particular group.…”