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

Argument-based generation and explanation of recommendations

In the recommender systems literature, it has been shown that, in addition to improving system effectiveness, explaining recommendations may increase user satisfaction, trust, persuasion and loyalty. In general, explanations focus on the filtering algorithms or the users and items involved in the generation of recommendations. However, on certain domains that are rich on user-generated textual content, it would be valuable to provide justifications of recommendations according to arguments that are explicit, underlying or related with the data used by the systems, e.g., the reasons for customers' opinions in reviews of e-commerce sites, and the requests and claims in citizens' proposals and debates of e-participation platforms. In this context, there is a need and challenging task to automatically extract and exploit the arguments given for and against evaluated items. We thus advocate to focus not only on user preferences and item features, but also on associated arguments. In other words, we propose to not only consider what is said about items, but also why it is said. Hence, arguments would not only be part of the recommendation explanations, but could also be used by the recommendation algorithms themselves. To this end, in this thesis, we propose to use argument mining techniques and tools that allow retrieving and relating argumentative information from textual content, and investigate recommendation methods that exploit that information before, during and after their filtering processesThe author thanks his supervisor Iván Cantador for his valuable support and guidance in defining this thesis project. The work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00

Evaluating the quality of e-democracy processes: an empirical study in the Greek context

Διπλωματική εργασία--Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2011.Public Authorities and Government use Infor-mation and Communication Technologies(ICTs) as tools to improve interaction and communi-cation with citizens, design new ways to access and participate in Public Authority processes or public decision-making processes and share the responsibility of political decision processes, heading for a new democratic model, better than the actual i.e. the model of e-democracy. This paper analyzes e-democracy and presents the quality model to evaluate e-democracy using the framework for the quality of e-democracy i.e. a four dimensional quality framework for the delivery of e-services adjusted to the e-democracy models, and is comprised by the following dimensions: coordination, control, sharing, and transparency. The framework is validated through an empirical research conducted among Greek citizens. Additionally, the benefits of e-democracy and the obstacles to enhance its quality are identified and analyzed

REALISING POLITICAL STABILITY IN NIGERIA THROUGH ICT-TRANSFORMED GOVERNMENT AT GRASSROOTS

Political processes are undergoing profound changes due to the challenges imposed by globalization processes to the legitimacy of policy actors and to the effectiveness of policymaking. Political stability emerges from the perceptions of the likelihood that the government will not be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including domestic violence and terrorism. Civil conflicts can lead to the destruction of limited resources, economic infrastructure, institutions of political stability and governance, and ethnic and social fabric. Public services are failing the poor in most countries making building public confidence in e-Government remain an agenda item for the countries. Nigerian Governments have been consistently facing challenges to reposition, reinvent, and realign themselves in light of increasing expectations for demonstrable results and enhanced responsiveness for a more cost effective, citizen-centric, and networked government evidenced by several incessant conflicts arising from marginalization of grassroots communities. Access to primary and authentic source of information at the grassroots is key to transparent and responsive government. The ICTs support for traditional governance is thus an effort aimed at building the capacity of indigenous political institutions, to participate in modern governance, have access to information and knowledge as well as to share experiences among themselves and with other stakeholders. This paper examines challenges and opportunities for transforming government and building an information-rich society. It provides strategies to digitize local government administration as a panacea to gaining access to authentic and reliable demographic data/information for meaningful decision-making processes towards attaining political stability from the grassroots level of governance using Nigeria’s Ondo State Local Government Areas as case study. It concludes by advocating the adoption and implementation of an “EATING” model, a bottom-up to participatory community engagement and development towards achieving political stability. Keywords: ICT-transformed, local government, political stability, responsiveness, transparenc

A Chatbot for Searching and Exploring Open Data: Implementation and Evaluation in E-Government

© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in DG.O2021: The 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, https://doi.org/10.1145/3463677.3463681In this paper, we present a chatbot to access open government data. Differently to similar systems reported in the research literature, the developed chatbot not only allows searching for data collections, but also exploring information within the collections. The exploration is done via complex queries that are easily built by non-expert users through a natural language conversation. Moreover, as another novel, differentiating contribution, we report a conducted user study aimed to evaluate the chatbot according to the achievement of a number of public service values, as well as measuring distinct objective and subjective metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms traditional methods followed in open data portalsThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00) and the Centre of Andalusian Studies (PR137/19). The authors thank to all people who participated in the reported stud

A neural blockchain for a tokenizable e-Participation model

Currently, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and, especially, Blockchain technology represent a great opportunity for public institutions to improve citizen participation and foster democratic innovation. These technologies facilitate the simplification of processes and provide secure management of recorded data, guaranteeing the transmission and public transparency of information. Based on the combination of a Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) platform and G-Cloud solutions, our proposal consists of the design of an e-Participation model that uses a tokenizable system of the actions and processes undertaken by citizens in participatory processes providing incentives to promote greater participation in public affairs. In order to develop a sustainable, scalable and resilient e-Participation system, a new blockchain concept, which organizes the blocks as a neural system, is combined with the implementation of a virtual token to reward participants. Furthermore, this virtual token is deployed through a smart contract that the block itself produces, containing information about the transaction and all the documents involved in the process. Finally, our Neural Distributed Ledger (NDL) framework facilitates the interconnection of blockchain networks in a transparent, certified, secure, auditable, scalable and traceable way

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

Does intelligence explain why nations differ in online political participation?

Wide use of Internet and subsequent development of e-government initiatives have lent support to the emergence of e-platforms for political engagement, a relatively new direction of participatory governance. Although determinants of citizen political participation have been at the core of theoretical and empirical discussions for quite a long time, in this research we contribute to extant literature by investigating the effect of national intelligence, as measured by Lynn and Vanhanen (2012), on the e-participation levels for 192 countries of the world. Our results suggest that higher IQ nations demonstrate higher rates of online presence in political deliberations. A number of robustness tests is undertaken to show that our findings remain intact

Does intelligence explain why nations differ in online political participation?

Wide use of Internet and subsequent development of e-government initiatives have lent support to the emergence of e-platforms for political engagement, a relatively new direction of participatory governance. Although determinants of citizen political participation have been at the core of theoretical and empirical discussions for quite a long time, in this research we contribute to extant literature by investigating the effect of national intelligence, as measured by Lynn and Vanhanen (2012), on the e-participation levels for 192 countries of the world. Our results suggest that higher IQ nations demonstrate higher rates of online presence in political deliberations. A number of robustness tests is undertaken to show that our findings remain intact

Technology Affordance and Constraint Perspectives on Social Media Use in eParticipation : A Case Study in Indonesia

Paper I-V are not available as a part of the dissertation due to the copyright.This doctoral thesis explains the role of social media within eParticipation from the perspective of politicians in the Indonesian context using the Technology Affordance and Constraints Theory (TACT) as a lens. Previous research findings into citizens’ perceptions of social media in eParticipation have been ambivalent; namely, social media can both encourage and discourage the democratic process depending on where, when, and how it is used. Furthermore, there is little understanding of the role of social media in influencing decision-making in the democratic process from the politicians’ perspective. Thus, my research is focused on gaining a more in-depth understanding of the role of social media in eParticipation from perspective of politicians through three main research questions: (1) How do politicians use social media for eParticipation purposes? (2) What are the constraints of social media use within eParticipation? and (3) What are the conditions needed for social media affordance acutalization to take place?publishedVersio