Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

Do social networking groups support online petitions?

This article is the post-print version of the final paper that has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy. Copyright @ Emerald Group Publishing LimitedEPetitioning has been emerging as arguably the most important eParticipation institutional activity. This paper aims to provide some insights into how ePetitions are perceived and supported by social networking sites. The connection between the UK government’s ePetitioning system and social networking groups linking to governmental petitions was investigated. Online data from Facebook were collected and analysed with respect to numbers of supporters compared to official signatures. The results indicate that although the process of signing an official petition is not more complex than joining a Facebook group, the membership of respective Facebook groups can be much higher. In particular, certain topics experienced very high support on Facebook which did not convert to signatures. The paper raises interesting questions about the potential uptake of citizen-government interactions in policy making mechanisms.The online research tool used for data collection in this paper was developed by Steven Sams who acknowledges support by the World Class University (WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea. The program is funded by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 515-82-06574

Engaging with citizens online: Understanding the role of ePetitioning in local government democracy

This article can be accessed from the link below.According to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act introduced in 2009, UK local authorities are expected to implement ―a facility for making petitions in electronic form to the authority‖. Motivated by this arrangement, this paper reflects on the findings of a case study investigation conducted with the Royal Borough of Kingston (one of the first local authorities to implement such a service since 2004). Lessons learnt from the case suggest that ePetitions reveal increased potential to enhance local government democracy, but are also shaped by challenging open implementation issues which can highly influence the initiative’s impact. Our conclusions are developed within the general debate about online public participation or eParticipation and particularly examine the implications for policy makers

Using social media to inform policy making: to whom are we listening?

Domination of social media is giving today’s web users a venue for expressing their views and sharing their experiences with others. With well over a billion active users, social networking sites (SNS) have become dynamic sources of information on peoples’ interests, needs and opinions and are considered an extremely rich source of content to reach out to many millions of people. This is creating a revolutionary opportunity for governments to learn about the citizens and to engage with them more effectively. The potential is there for eParticipation applications to go from simply informing the public to unprecedented levels of interaction and engagement between Policy Makers (PMs) and the community, involving the public in deliberation processes leading to legislation. Despite its great potential, several concerns arise from the exploitation of social media, especially when used to inform policy making. Among these issues we can highlight the lack of awareness of the characteristics of those citizens discussing policy topics in social media, and lack of awareness of the characteristics of their discussions. Although some studies have emerged in the last few years that aim to capture the demographics of social media users (e.g., gender, age, geographical locations) they tend not to focus on those specific users participating in policy discussions. Understanding who are the users discussing policy in social media and how policy topics are debated could help assessing how their views and opinions should be weighted and considered to inform policy making. Aiming to provide a step forward in this direction, this paper investigates the characteristics of over 8K users involved in policy discussions in Twitter. These discussions were collected by monitoring, for one week, 42 different political topics selected by sixteen PMs from different political institutions in Germany. Our results indicate that: (i) a high volume of conversations around policy topics does not come from citizens, but from news agencies and other organisations, (ii) the average user discussing policy topics in Twitter is more active, popular and engaged than the average Twitter user and, (iii) users engaged in social media conversations around policy topics tend to be geographically concentrated in constituencies with high population density. Regarding the analysed conversations, a small subset of topics is extensively discussed while the majority go relatively unnoticed

`ICT Policy` for ICT service management - role of business organizations in national reforms agenda for services sector

Several governments around the world have made significant endeavours and allegiances to deliver new National Reforms Agenda (NRA) in order to drive sustained prosperity for their citizens e.g. the cases of Australian, Georgia, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) governments etc. In general, the rationale for transformation in NRA has been manifold such as: (a) healthier and more active the population, the stronger the economy; (b) the more skilled the population, the higher the productivity; (c) the greater the degree of social inclusion, the greater the workforce/stakeholder participation and (b) improving individual government’s investment climate and strengthening democratic and political institutions. Notwithstanding, in the present and coming decades nationals of different countries around the world are (to a greater extent due to the credit crunch) and further will be facing immense challenges, due to mounting competitiveness in the global economy. Some governments are highly aware of the magnitude and complexity of these challenges. Nevertheless, resolving these challenges is not merely within the jurisdiction of the national government – success will essentially hinge on a collaborative working relationship within all levels of governments (e.g. local, national, central) and business/trading stakeholders. As a result of this collaboration, formulating and consigning prosperity to citizens. The research carried out in this paper strives to exemplify the objectives of the national reforms in general. In addition, structural change of the reformation policy is presented to the business organisations for the purpose of enabling them by focusing on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based participation and productivity in service management

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

Mapping eParticipation Research: Four Central Challenges

The emerging research area of eParticipation can be characterized as the study of technology-facilitated citizen participation in (democratic) deliberation and decision-making. Using conventional literature study techniques, we identify 105 articles that are considered to be highly relevant to eParticipation. We develop a definitional schema that suggests different ways of understanding an emerging socio-technical research area and use this schema to map the research contributions identified. This allows us make an initial sketch of the scientific character of the area and its central concerns, theories, and methods. We extend the analysis to define four central research challenges for the field: understanding technology and participation; the strategic challenge; the design challenge; and the evaluation challenge. This article thus contributes to a developing account of eParticipation, which will help future researchers both to navigate the research area and to focus their research agendas

Making Sense of Gov 2.0 Strategies: "No Citizens, No Party"

One of the main factors contributing to the limited impact of eParticipation projects is the presence of a high level of social complexity that has been identified by Macintosh as one of the five challenges in the implementation of eParticipation practices. How to make sense of social complexity is still an open issue as well as the way governments can take benefit from the wealth of information that is already available on their constituencies' collective behaviour. In this paper, we contend that the presence of a considerable variance in terms of political interests, educational level and technological skills makes it very difficult to design workable and effective systems to support participation. A modular strategy is then recommended requiring policy designers to make a step towards citizens rather than expecting the citizenry to move their content production activity onto the "official" spaces created for ad hoc participation

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

A business model perspective for ICTs in public engagement

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published article can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierPublic institutions, in their efforts to promote meaningful citizen engagement, are increasingly looking at the democratic potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Previous studies suggest that such initiatives seem to be impeded by socio-technical integration barriers such as low sustainability, poor citizen acceptance, coordination difficulties, lack of understanding and failure to assess their impact. Motivated by these shortcomings, the paper develops and applies a business model perspective as an interceding framework for analysis and evaluation. The underlying principle behind this approach is that it is not technology per se which determines success, but rather the way in which the businessmodel of the technological artifact is configured and employed to achieve the strategic goals. The business model perspective is empirically demonstrated with the case of an online petitioning system implemented by a UK local authority. The case illustrates the importance of considering ICTs in public engagement from a holistic view to make them more manageable and assessable