Passive crowdsourcing in government using social media

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on "passive crowdsourcing" by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy. Design/methodology/approach -This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews.Findings -A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach has been developed, which is quite different from the one of the usual active crowdsourcing. Based on it, the functional architecture of the required supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure has been formulated, and then its technological architecture has been designed, addressing the conflicting requirements: low response time and, at the same time, provision of sufficiently "fresh" content for policymakers. Practical implications -Taking into account that traditionally government agencies monitor what the press writes about them, our research provides a basis for extending efficiently these activities in the new electronic media world (e.g. newspapers websites, blogs and microblogs, online forums, etc.) to understand better the needs, issues, opinions, arguments and proposals raised by the society with respect to important domains of government activity and public policies. Social implications -The proposed approach provides a new channel for the "voice" of the society to be directly communicated to the government so that the latter can design its policies and activities based on the social needs and realities and not on oversimplified models and stereotypes. Originality/value -Our paper proposes a novel approach to e-participation, which exploits the Web 2.0 social media -but in a quite different way from previous approaches -for conducting "passive crowdsourcing", and elaborates it: it develops an application process model for it and also an ICT infrastructure for supporting it, which are quite different from the ones of the existing "active crowdsourcing" approaches.

Predicting Citizens Acceptance of Government-led e-Participation Initiatives through Social Media: A Theoretical Model

“…Therefore, many government-led eParticipation initiatives have been linked to several social media networks -in particular, Facebook and Twitter -in an effort to enhance citizens engagement [10,30,41,45]. Despite such efforts, the challenge of e-Participation initiatives to engage more citizens still remains [14,48,57].…”

“…The trend of citizens to use social media to express their opinions is encouraging more governments to follow citizens on those networks rather than expecting them to come to governments websites [14,44]. Therefore, many government-led eParticipation initiatives have been linked to several social media networks -in particular, Facebook and Twitter -in an effort to enhance citizens engagement [10,30,41,45].…”

Social Media Use for Decision Making Process in Educational Settings: The Greek Case for Leaderships Views and Attitude in Secondary and Tertiary Education

“…These benefits focus on better understanding of peoples' needs, desires and views, during a bottom-up public policy making process that not only identifies problems and needs but also sufficiently responds to them [20,23]. Furthermore, the deposit of opinions and ideas by citizens -in this case students, staff, teachers-which result in creative and innovative response actions and policies [40,41] on several problems is identified as benefit.…”

“…Citizens' high participation in these channels provided vast information regarding views about governmental policy, social needs, problems and suggested actions. In this bottom-up approach, citizens' e-participation was less controlled by governmental organizations, which despite they set the topics up to a point, they did not control the rules of the discussion, defined by social media [20][21][22][23].…”

“…blogs, sites, forums), without any dialogue initiation or prior processing of the content by governments. The content of the debates is detected, recovered and then through advanced techniques, citizens' opinions, arguments and recommendations on a specific policy are automatically extracted, in order to identify their feelings, to be analyzed and ultimately result in summarization and illustration of them [20][21][22][23].…”