Increasing Policy Success through the Use of Social Media Cross-Channels for Citizen Political Engagement

In the ubiquitous digitization era, governments increasingly adopt multi-social media channels for the purpose of facilitating citizen engagement towards enhanced government transparency, external political efficacy and policy success. However, little is known about the use of social media cross-channel information-sharing mechanisms for promoting citizen political engagement. We draw on theories of citizen interaction and citizen-centric e-governance to examine the central research question: How can citizens’ become politically engaged through the use of social media cross communication channels? Specifically, we examine and explain YouTube-enabled government-to-citizens interactions and YouTube-Twitter cross-channel information-sharing behaviors among citizens in response to Jakarta, Indonesia’s use of YouTube to inform citizens of the government transparency initiative. We applied social network analysis to examine the structure of and information flows within Twitter social networks formed through the use of cross-channel information-sharing mechanism by YouTube users to tweet the promotion of the YouTube-enabled government transparency videos to their Twitter followers

Implicit Social Networking: Discovery of Hidden Relationships, Roles and Communities among Consumers

AbstractThis paper proposes the implicit social networking as an innovative methodology for approaching consumers who possess information-rich user profiles based on aplethora of online services they use. An implicit social network is not explicitly built by consumers themselves, but implicitly calculated by third parties based on a level of a common interest between consumers (i.e., profile matchmaking). The analysis of aconsumer social network created in such a manner enables discovery of hidden roles, relationships and communities among consumers and represents a basis for provisioning of innovative services (e.g., personalized and/or context-aware services such as recommender systems). The implicit social networking methodology is evaluated through two pilot cases: (i) implicit social networking based on the SmartSocial platform; and (ii) implicit social networking of IPTV users. The generalizability of the implicit social networking is demonstrated through additional example aimed not at external company stakeholders (e.g., company consumers), but at internal stakeholders (i.e., company employees) through the implicit corporate social networking pilot case

Actor network analysis to leverage improvements in conservation and development outcomes in Cambodia

Network analysis has emerged as a useful practice for characterizing governance relationships and providing insights to the power relations that affect landscapes. We applied actor network analysis in two rural Cambodian landscapes to examine decision-making structures that affect conservation and development systems. Using questionnaire data, we analyze structural features of networks of cooperation and exchange to identify patterns of action and processes of change. We supplement our analysis with qualitative information gathered on power and social ecological components of landscapes to enrich our understanding of natural resource systems. We find that power in Cambodia is concentrated in a central hierarchy, and external actors aiming to influence decision making would benefit from operating at multiple scales; there is no single leverage point for interventions. Cooperation between conservation and development actors is lacking; we observe that actors tend to cluster within similar groups. Cross-sectoral collaboration may be enhanced by knowledge brokers, but current actors lack resources to fulfil this role and require external support. Our study highlights the importance of nongovernment actors as conveners and facilitators to shape natural resource governance in the context of weak institutions. We advocate more institutionalized use of diagnostics, such as actor network analysis, for enhanced natural resource governance

Local governments' participation in intergovernmental e-government projects: a comparative network analysis of two case study's

Both the Belgian federal and Flemish regional government have framed the development of a series of authentic information sources as a key solution to reduce administrative burden for companies and citizens as these crossroads banks allow the sharing of information between different government agencies at different levels of government. The ultimate goal is to realize a more integrated, efficient and effective government service delivery towards citizens and companies. In our paper, we will compare the results of two case studies that elaborated on the participation of local governments within these intergovernmental data sharing projects. In the first case study (Snijkers, 2006a, 2006b), the connection of Flemish local welfare agencies on to the Crossroads Bank for Social Security (CBSS) was analysed. The second case study provides insights in the disclosure of the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) towards Flemish cities and municipalities. Both case studies made use of network literature to explain the participation of local governments agencies within the projects. In particular, the authors (Snijkers, 2004; Snijkers, 2005; Vander Elst, Rotthier & De Rynck, 2011) mainly made use of Snellen’s (2003) theoretical framework complemented with other theoretical insights about how networks function (see Kumar & van Dissel, 1996; Schermerhorn, 1975). Following Snellen, networks consist of three different dimensions: a strategic, a power and an institutional dimension. The power dimension refers to the dependencies between the network’s stakeholders (e.g. money, expertise, information, …). The strategic dimension refers to the degree to which the objectives of the different members of the network con- or diverge to each other. Finally, the institutional dimension concerns the degree to which the interaction between the different stakeholders has been institutionalized. Both studies offers us the opportunity to conduct a reliable comparison as they are conducted based on a similar research design in terms of the research strategy (case study), the research method ((semi structured) interviews with key actors) and the theoretical framework being applied (Snellen’s framework). Moreover in both studies, the same variables were operationalized: conflict, cooperation, dependency, independency and the con- and divergence of the stakeholders’ objectives. In particular, our comparison will focus on how these variables have influenced local welfare agencies and municipalities to connect on to respectively the CBSS and the CBE. Next, we will identify the similarities and differences between both cases and explain these differences based on the network features that characterize both intergovernmental data sharing projects. The objective of this comparative analysis is to generate new empirical findings in how governments are setting up intergovernmental data sharing projects as insights in this phenomenon have remained rare (see for example Yang & Maxwell, 2011; Gil-Garcia, Ae Chun & Janssen, 2009). Next to our ‘empirical objective’, we also want to elaborate on the surplus of using network theories when analysing the development of intergovernmental eGovernment projects and the participation of local government agencies within these projects. In this way, this paper proposal also meets the call for papers in which an appeal is made to elaborate on “which theoretical lenses could be used to help us understand and explain what is happening and it relationships with citizens, business (…)” and to drew attention on to the “the nature and impact of ICT-enabled changes in the public sector and its external relationships.”

Analysis of open innovation communities from the perspective of social network analysis

Open innovation is an emergent paradigm by which organisations make use of their internal and external resources to perform their innovation processes. The growth of information and communication technologies has facilitated the spread of online open innovation communities, where users can share ideas as well as comment on and evaluate ideas posted by other community members. In this work, the behaviour of community members is analysed from the perspective of social network analysis. The final aim is twofold: first, to measure to what extent the different forms of participation are correlated to each other; and, second, how the collective intelligence evaluation schemes can be useful to identify those users posting ideas which are potentially applicable for the organisation. Obtained results can help community managers and organisations to improve the efficiency of the evaluation process when hundreds or thousands of ideas are shared through the online communit

An exploratory data analysis of the #Crowdfunding network on Twitter

Together, social media and crowdsourcing can help entrepreneurs to attract external finance and early-stage customers. This paper investigates the characteristics and discourse of an issue-centered public on Twitter organized around the hashtag #crowdfunding through the lens of social network theory. Using a dataset of 2,732,144 tweets published during a calendar year, we use exploratory data analysis to generate insights and hypotheses on who the users in the #crowdfunding network are, what they share, and how they are connected to each other. In order to do so, we adopt a range of descriptive, content, network analytics techniques. The results suggest that platforms, crowdfunders, and other actors who derive income from the crowdfunding economy play a key role in creating the network. Furthermore, latent ties (strangers) play a direct role in disseminating information, investing, and sending signals to platforms that further raises campaign prominence. We also introduce a new type of social tie, the “computer as a social actor”, previously unaddressed in entrepreneurial network literature, which play a role in sending signals to both platforms and networks. Our results suggest that homophily is a key driver for creating network sub-communities built around specific platforms, project types, domains, or geograph

Experimental Analysis of the Relevance of Features and Effects on Gender Classification Models for Social Media Author Profiling

[Abstract] Automatic user profiling from social networks has become a popular task due to its commercial applications (targeted advertising, market studies...). Automatic profiling models infer demographic characteristics of social network users from their generated content or interactions. Users’ demographic information is also precious for more social worrying tasks such as automatic early detection of mental disorders. For this type of users’ analysis tasks, it has been shown that the way how they use language is an important indicator which contributes to the effectiveness of the models. Therefore, we also consider that for identifying aspects such as gender, age or user’s origin, it is interesting to consider the use of the language both from psycho-linguistic and semantic features. A good selection of features will be vital for the performance of retrieval, classification, and decision-making software systems. In this paper, we will address gender classification as a part of the automatic profiling task. We show an experimental analysis of the performance of existing gender classification models based on external corpus and baselines for automatic profiling. We analyse in-depth the influence of the linguistic features in the classification accuracy of the model. After that analysis, we have put together a feature set for gender classification models in social networks with an accuracy performance above existing baselines.This work was supported by projects RTI2018-093336-B-C21, RTI2018-093336-B-C22 (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innvovacion & ERDF) and the financial support supplied by the Conselleria de Educacion, Universidade e Formacion Profesional (accreditation 2019-2022 ED431G/01, ED431B 2019/03) and the European Regional Development Fund, which acknowledges the CITIC Research Center in ICT of the University of A Coruna as a Research Center of the Galician University System.Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431B 2019/0

Innovation, Regulation and the Selection Environment

This article focuses on the question of how regulation can be best designed to encourage technological innovation. Most scholarship in this area applies standard economic analysis to evaluate the impact of various forms of regulation on technological innovation. We reject that approach as too narrow, drawing instead upon principles of evolutionary economics. The basic premise of the article is that a firm’s technology choices—and its response to regulation intended to shape those choices—are influenced by other actors (such as suppliers and competitors), by external social and legal institutions (e.g., industry standards and norms) and by the firms\u27 internal structure (such as communication channels.) Regulators seeking to encourage innovation must first understand the industry sector\u27s selection environment; that is, the socio-economic environment created by that network of actors, institutions, and routines. We demonstrate the selection environment approach in a case study of the dry cleaning sector, a leading source of toxic emissions in Southern California. Professional drycleaners have been slow to adopt alternative non-polluting cleaning technologies. Relying upon surveys and interviews we conducted of cleaners, equipment vendors, and regulators, we construct a conceptual model of the sector\u27s selection environment. We then use that model to identify barriers to innovation, and to evaluate several policy tools intended to overcome those barriers. Our analysis is a cautionary tale for those who support broad use of market-based regulation such as economic incentives and information strategies. In the selection environment we studied, traditional command and control regulation is likely to lead to broader diffusion of the new environmentally-beneficial cleaning technologies than market-based approaches, and at less social cost

The importance of socio-technical resources for software ecosystems management

AbstractSoftware Ecosystem (SECO) is often understood as a set of actors interacting among themselves and manipulating artifacts with the support of a common technology platform. Usually, SECO approaches can be designed as an environment whose component repository is gathering stakeholders as well as software products and components. By manipulating software artifacts, a technical network emerges from interactions made over the component repository in order to reuse artifacts, improving code quality, downloading, selling, buying etc. Although technical repositories are essential to store SECO’s artifacts, the interaction among actors in an emerging social network is a key factor to strengthen the SECO’s through increasing actor’s participation, e.g., developing new software, reporting bugs, and communicating with suppliers. In the SECO context, both the internal and external actors keep the platform’s components updated and documented, and even support requirements and suggestions for new releases and bug fixes. However, those repositories often lack resources to support actors’ relationships and consequently to improve the reuse processes by stimulating actors’ interactions, information exchange and better understanding on how artifacts are manipulated by actors. In this paper, we focused on investigating SECO as component repositories that include socio-technical resources. As such, we present a survey that allowed us to identify the relevance of each resource for a SECO based on component repositories, initially focused on the Brazilian scenario. This paper also describes the analysis of the data collected in that survey. Information of other SECO elements extracted from the data is also presented, e.g., the participants’ profile and how they behave within a SECO. As an evolution of our research, a study for evaluating the availability and the use of such resources on top of two platforms was also conducted with experts in collaborative development in order to analyze the usage of the most relevant resources in real SECO’s platforms. We concluded that socio-technical resources have aided collaboration in software development for SECO, coordination of teams based on more knowledge of actor’s tasks and interactions, and monitoring of quality of SECOs’ platforms through the orchestration of the contributions developed by external actors

The implementation of information strategies to support sustainable procurement

In our research context, sustainable procurement can be seen as a process to reduce damage to the environment by integrating certain aspects into making procurement decisions, such as value for money throughout the whole life cycle and being of benefit to society and the economy. This research has found more than one way of interpreting the ‘sustainable system’, for example, ‘green-friendly’ versus remaining effective in the long term. Sustainable procurement requires specific information to support the procurement process. The study reported in this thesis aimed to investigate the type of information needed in order for organisations to make correct sustainable procurement decisions. From these findings, information architecture for sustainable procurement in UK universities has been derived. While the initial focus has been on the information needed to make informed decisions in purchasing sustainable information technology (IT) equipment, it is believed that the framework would also be more widely applicable to other types of purchases. To ensure that these findings would support the university aspiration in terms of sustainability practices, a goal-context modelling technique called VMOST/B-SCP was chosen to analyse the sustainable procurement strategy in order to evaluate the alignment of IT strategy and its business strategy. A goal-context model using VMOST/B-SCP was produced to evaluate the procurement strategy, with this validated by procurement staff. This research helps to improve the way that goals and context are identified by integrating another technique, namely, social network analysis (SNA) to produce actor network diagrams. The VMOST/B-SCP technique is transferrable to the mapping of action strategies. The findings from goal-context modelling show that a goal-context model is not static: it changes as external circumstances and organisational priorities change. Most changes to the strategy occurred where external entities on which the change programme depended did not act as planned. The actor networks produced in our version of VMOST/B-SCP can be used to identify such risks. This research was pioneering in its use of VMOST/B-SCP in examining a business change while it was actually taking place rather than after it had been completed (and thus needed to accommodate changes in objectives and strategies). In addition, the research analysed a system with some IT support but where human-operated procedures predominated. The original B-SCP framework used Jackson’s problem frames which focus on possible software components: in our scenario, SNA-inspired actor diagrams were found to be more appropriate