Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media

Abstract

Abstract. The emergence of web 2.0 social media enables the gradual emergence of a second generation of e-participation characterized by more citizens' control, in which government agencies post content (e.g. short or longer text, images, video) to various social media and then analyze citizens' interactions with it (e.g. views, likes/dislikes, comments, etc.). In this paper we propose an even more citizens controlled third generation of e-participation exploiting web 2.0 social media as well, but in a different manner. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large set of web 2.0 sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings. This content undergoes advanced processing in order to extract from it arguments, opinions, issues and proposals on the particular policy, identify their sentiments (positive or negative), and finally summarize and visualize them. This approach allows the exploitation of the vast amount of user-generated content created in numerous web 2.0 social media for supporting governments to understand better the needs, wishes and beliefs of citizens, and create better and more socially rooted policies.

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.…”

“…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. Beneficial is also the conversion of the initially "silent knowledge" which is diffused by a large number of citizens to code and explicit knowledge that can be used to design better policies [20,21].…”

“…Ideas and knowledge of stakeholders based on the needs that emerge in educational environments will allow heads to identify the cultural, social and economic changes in order to plan appropriate actions to address them [20]. Furthermore participation will bring a range of information and experiences in the process, in order to foster fairer and better proved policies, greater support by all stakeholders and thus more effective implementation of these policies within a democratically functioning educational framework.…”

“…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].…”