DEFINING THE IT ARTEFACT IN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EPARTICIPATION: AN ENSEMBLE VIEW

Social media has become a popular outlet for various eParticipation activities, such as online campaigning by political parties. Much research on this topic is currently being undertaken, and so far research has shown that political parties often have limited success with their efforts. Much is yet unclear as to the results and possible applications of social media use. One contribution to this could be to clearly define the social media IT artefact as a socio-technical object. In this paper, we propose and define an ensemble view on social media use in eParticipation, consisting of a framework for the identification of technological issues, and information infrastructures to address the social issues. Together, these provide us with a comprehensive definition of the social media IT artefact

Electronic participation through social media

It is widely acknowledge that many of e-Participation initiatives often attract wider audience and face serious limited citizens’ involvement. The use of social media has been seen as a hope to remedy such limitation. However, despite the recently adoption of social media the lack of citizens’ involvement in e-Participation initiatives still remains. This ongoing research paper aims at producing a general overview of e-Participation through social media. So far, the latest research works on such topic have been predominantly focused on a political context of e-Participation, where politicians-citizens interactions and activities are the central interest of the studies. Little existing studies investigate e-Participation in its own right in government context. The findings also reveal that the majority of e-Participation through social media initiatives are more informative than interactive, since few initiatives have been found that aim to considerably enhance citizen participation in policy decision making.This work has been supported by Portuguese FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology within the Project Scope UID /CEC / 00319/2013info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Electronic participation with a special reference to social media - a literature review

As a consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of Electronic Partici-pation (e-Participation), current research on the field is fragmented and scattered. The exciting blurry boundaries and the immature identity of the field are making difficult the understanding of the main domain themes being investigated, in par-ticular for “neophytes” researchers. In practice, several e-Participation initiatives often attract a wide audience but face serious limitations regarding involvement of those who attract. Recently, the potential of using social media to address cit-izens’ involvement deficit has been subject of academic debate. By consulting 44 e-Participation papers, considered highly relevant to the aforementioned chal-lenges, this paper produces a general overview of e-Participation research, par-ticularly through social media. The findings show that the e-Participation field still faces the challenge of identity and strive for gaining wider recognition as an independent research area. Concerning e-Participation through social media which seems to be partly overlooked in the field research, the politicians-citizen’s interaction has dominated scholars' attention and the adoption of such initiatives sponsored and driven by governments are rarely examine. Based on the findings, several research suggestions, which could play a significant contribution to advance future e-Participation research, are proposed

Designing Urban Participation Platforms – Model for Goal-oriented Classification of Participation Mechanisms

Citizens are increasingly shaping their city selfdetermined. To do so, they use digital platforms to start projects, gain awareness or raise funds. These and other participation mechanisms enable citizens to participate in manifold ways. With the help of the tree ring model introduced in our contribution, we present a tool that is intended to support practitioners in evaluating and developing their platforms. The model was designed based on the analysis of 22 existing platforms as well as a literature review and evaluated in qualitative interviews. The result is a tree ring model that shows a new understanding of participation apart from hierarchical structures. The citizens’ role classification and the possible mechanisms that can offer practitioners effective implications for the design of participation platforms

Advances in e-Participation: A perspective of Last Years

[EN] The opinions of citizens are now being given ever-increasing consideration. Today, many government administrations have set up public participation processes as one more of the inputs required to make a decision on several aspects of governance. e-Participation initiatives make it easier for citizens to access such processes. At the present time, there is no clear and accepted field definition due to the wide diversity of theoretical proposals and the interdisciplinary nature of the initiatives, many of which have been developed ad-hoc. This paper reviews the present literature in the field of e-Participation by means of a systematic mapping of the research work carried out in the timeframe 2000¿2019, together with some earlier relevant proposals in the area, with the aim of obtaining a conceptual guide to e-Participation components. This review analyses the findings and clusters the results into a conceptual e-Participation framework, which we call eP fw . The results show the diversity of the conceptualizations of many authors (25% on average) in the identification of tools, areas and levels in the field of e-participation and the almost null incorporation of fundamental aspects like trust, security, or transparency. We also found a lack of systems development (13.3%) that would prove and allow the proposed theories to be put into practiceThe work of A. Santamaría-Philco was supported in part by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) Scholarship Program of the Republic of Ecuador, and in part by the Universidad Laica Eloy Alfaro de Manabí (ULEAM). The work of J. H. Canós and M. C. Penadés was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Government of Spain through the Project CALPE under Grant TIN2015-68608-R and Grant BS123456.Santamaria-Philco, AA.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penades Gramage, MC. (2019). Advances in e-Participation: A perspective of Last Years. IEEE Access. 7:155894-155916. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2948810S155894155916

Smart Governance: Opportunities for technologically-mediated citizen co-production

Citizens increasingly contribute directly to the evolution of sustainable cities, in particular where new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to transform urban governance into ‘Smart city governance’ and where ICTs are integrated in strategies for citizen participation and the co-production of public services and policy. This article provides a multi-disciplinary understanding of Smart city governance, including new insights around the opportunities for citizen engagement in the co-production of service-delivery and decision-making. Using findings from a review of Smart cities literature and practice, the article aims to establish the breadth of Smart city initiatives which emphasise citizen participation and the realities of delivering such initiatives in complex city environments. Emphasising the emerging role of the technologically ‘empowered’ citizen, a new conceptual model is presented, where mutual trust, shared understanding and new opportunities for co-production emerge in an environment mediated by new technology – this form of Smart governance is referred to here as ‘technologically-mediated municipal reciprocity’

Identifying the potential risks of political eparticipation for adult learners

Adult education encourages digital literacy as an unmitigated good. In the current conjuncture, it does not encourage political literacy to the same degree. There is undoubtedly a nexus between the two, with a need for political literacy in the online environment. This paper argues that many adult learners remain ill-equipped to competently 'read' and respond to the political messages they receive online. Moreover, the problem is escalating rapidly, as the methods that political parties employ to influence people become increasingly subtle and sophisticated. At the same time we see the rise in 'fake news,' in extremism of all kinds and the declining status of the 'expert' in a 'post truth world' (Mele et al., 2017). Given this context, this paper asks the following questions: what are the perceptions of a sample of trainee teachers working in UK further and adult education with regard to the place of online political literacy in the curriculum? do these perceptions chime with what we know of the status of political literacy in current UK qualifications and curricula? in light of the answers to these questions, are adult learners being adequately equipped to protect their data and interpret the political messages they receive through social media? Whilst the authors recognise the potential of the internet to mobilise political engagement and as an enabler of activism in many contexts, this paper focuses on the attendant risks of e-participation

Citizen E-Participation: Bringing the “E” to Facilitated Workshops

Citizen participation initiatives enable public decision-makers to integrate the knowledge and preferences of citizens into municipal planning processes at an early stage. To this end, workshops are frequently and recurrently utilized instruments, which foster the collaboration of citizens with public authorities and with one another. With the rise of ICT, e-participation has evolved as a strategic pillar in digital governance, but has not fully reached participation workshops yet. Establishing an integrated e-participation approach that combines traditional and e-participation instruments poses a challenge in practice. Therefore, we apply Collaboration Engineering to design and evaluate an e-participation workshop process, which incorporates theoretical and practical requirements, allows the seamless transfer of digitally generated input across instruments and process steps, and sustains a workshop execution by domain-specific practitioners. Evaluation results suggest promising potentials of the developed process design for increased idea elaboration and more effective documentation of workshop-based participation

The diffusion of e-participation in public administrations:A systematic literature review

Research on e-participation has grown significantly in the last years. This review focuses on public administrations, which are central actors in the solicitation and organization of e-participation and in the process of diffusion of more democratic decision-making in government contexts. However, research indicates that public administrations often struggle with technological and organizational changes, which suggests that e-participation initiatives may fail due to barriers within public administrations. Although researchers have paid considerable attention to the diffusion of e-participation in public administrations, research so far is multi-disciplinary and fragmented. The aim of this literature review is to structure and systematize the literature regarding phases of e-participation diffusion (adoption, implementation and institutionalization) and levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) to map the extant field of e-participation diffusion research and to provide a starting point for future research. The analysis shows that research has concentrated on the phases of adoption and implementation, and on the external context of public administrations (macro) and the organizational (meso) level. Overall, the review identifies major research gaps and offers avenues for future research