GOV 2.0: Exploring the Use of Web 2.0 Tools by Local Government in Southwestern Ontario

This paper examines how local governments in Ontario are using Web 2.0 technologies, with a specific focus on whether or not Web 2.0 is being used by local government as a medium for citizen engagement. It uses interviews to uncover whether or not the selected municipalities in Southwestern Ontario are using social media for citizen engagement purposes, in addition to a policy review of their social media policies. The six municipalities that were selected include: South Huron, London, Dufferin County, Kitchener, Central Elgin, and one municipality that chose to remain anonymous. The findings reveal that municipalities in Southwestern Ontario are not using social media for citizen engagement to the extent that the literature review suggests and policymaking and service provision are not based on input from citizens through social media

DESIGNING AN M-GOVERNMENT SOLUTION: ENABLING COLLABORATION THROUGH CITIZEN SOURCING

y combining openness with m-government, OECD and the research community envisage benefits, and action is called for within this field. The objective of this paper is to answer these calls and address the research question How to design a citizen sourcing m-government solution to facilitate collaboration between governments and citizens? An instantiation of a complaint and problem management solution is designed and evaluated using design science. The solution (named Munizapp) comprises a mobile application (app) and an integration platform (ePlatform). The app is the front-end for citizens, enabling them to report complaints and problems to municipalities. The ePlatform facilitates seamless two-way communication between the app and back-end case management system in municipalities. Different evaluation activities have been carried out that proved the enabling features of the solution for facilitating collaboration. Usability evaluation and knowledge gained through the research process provides new knowledge to citizen sourcing and m-government theory. One example is the need to expand citizen sourcing frameworks to also include stakeholders other than citizens and governments as well as the need to explicate value co-creation between all stakeholders touched by the solution. The paper ends with suggestion for future research on value co-creation

The Promise of a Crowd

This paper presents an evaluation of a mobile complaint and problem-reporting solution made for Swedish municipalities and their citizens. The evaluation is made through a government 2.0 framework to assess the appropriateness of the initiative as a citizen-sourcing solution. The research approach consists of a secondary analysis of empirical data. The researchers have been active participants in gathering the data for the secondary analysis. The results show that although the promise of the crowd is very prominent in the technical platform, municipalities are not prepared to fully utilize the citizen-sourcing solution. The main contribution for research is a widening of the body of knowledge regarding citizen-sourcing by an empirical application of a previously developed theoretical citizen-sourcing framework. The paper contributes to society and practice through highlighting difficulties that can be expected when realizing the promise of the crowd

Exploring the Motives of Citizen Reporting Engagement: Self-Concern and Other-Orientation

In smart city contexts, voluntary citizen reporting can be a particularly valuable source of information for local authorities. A key question in this regard is what motivates citizens to contribute their data. Drawing on motivation research in social psychology, the paper examines the question of whether self-concern or other-orientation is a stronger driver of citizen reporting engagement. To test their hypotheses, the authors rely on a sample of users from the mobile application “Zurich as good as new” in Switzerland, which enables citizens to report damages in and other issues with the city’s infrastructure. Data was collected from two different sources: motivation was assessed in an online user survey (n = 650), whereas citizen reporting engagement was measured by the number of reports per user from real platform-use data. The analysis was carried out using negative binomial regression. The findings suggest that both self-concern and other-orientation are significant drivers of citizen reporting engagement, although the effect of self-concern appears to be stronger in comparison. As such, this study contributes to a better understanding of what motivates citizens to participate in citizen reporting platforms, which are a cornerstone application in many smart cities

Social Computing as an E-Participation Tool in South Africa: An Exploratory Study

Social Computing technologies have become prevalent in all spheres of life; businesses, individuals and governments are adopting these technologies at a fast pace. These technologies are interactive and collaborative and therefore present an opportunity to bridge communication gaps between governments and citizens. The main objective of this paper is to explore the use of Social Computing as a tool for public participation in South Africa. Social Computing presents local government with the opportunity to reach out to a larger number of citizens and involve them in policy making while providing them with information relevant to policy making, improve service delivery, improve accountability and transparency. This is especially true with the increase in the number of South African citizens on Social Computing platforms

Using Social Media for Government Passive Expert-Sourcing

Social Media have been initially used by government agencies for general public oriented -˜citizen-sourcing’. Though this enabled the collection of useful policy relevant information and knowledge from the general public, and provided valuable insights into their relevant perceptions, it would be quite useful if this could be combined with the collection of policy relevant information and knowledge from experts as well (-˜expert-sourcing’). In this paper, a passive expert-sourcing method based on social media, which has been developed in a European research project, is evaluated from a fundamental perspective: the wicked problems theory perspective. In particular, we investigate to what extent this method enables government agencies to collect high quality information concerning the main elements of important social problems to be addressed through public policies: particular issues posed, alternative interventions/ actions, and advantages/disadvantages of them; as well as to what extent there is consensus about these elements among different stakeholder groups. For this purpose data are collected through interviews with Members of the Greek Parliament. From their analysis interesting conclusions have been drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this expert-sourcing method, as well as required impro-vements of it

Analysis and automation of remedies for community hardships of non-native community

Abstract. Equality among all human beings, as a world community surpassing all the barriers such as religion, language, ethnicity, geographical location, and nationality is an important aspect all over the world. The equality for non-native communities of the country is a more important aspect of human equality. The hardships faced by the non-native community of society due to lack of equality cause irreversible damage to humankind and society. Lately, with the development of many technologies and new implementations, the fact that these technologies can assist in solving social problems came into discussion. Considering the hardships faced by non-native communities in terms of a social problem we explore how technology can assist in solving social matters. Thereby we explore a novel vision for the part that technology can contribute in solving civic matters encompassing frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking. In this thesis, we do a study on background work on how we can solve civic matters by assisting public participation frameworks, crowdsourcing frameworks, and design thinking frameworks. For this purpose, we presented three hardship stories that the non-native community of Finnish university faces which have been collected through a previous study, to collect ideas, and thoughts on how to mitigate the situation. We employed three questionnaires designed based on three conditions the conditions were First one is the baseline where the answers to the questionnaires will not be analyzed anywhere, and the second questionnaire condition is that the ideas will be used in social media and the third is that the ideas will be subjected to a quality analysis by crowd workers. To this end, we have collected ideas from 40 participants for each questionnaire with the aid of a prolific crowd-sourcing platform. Each of the questionnaires included a Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) questionnaire section to measure empathy. Further, we Analyse the data that we have collected, through a QCAE analysis, word count, and answer length analysis, analyzing the co-relations between them, doing thematic coding, and doing a tone analysis. Moreover, we implemented an automated pipeline to do tone analysis starting from fetching answers from google forms to output the tone analysis results. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to Collecting ideas on how to mitigate the hardship experiences faced by non-native communities in a Finnish university. Further enhances the awareness of the hardships faced by the non-native community of a society. And through the analysis of the results we identified different co-relations between different factors like word count and Empathy. Analyze the tone of the participants in civic issues. Finally discussed the part that technology can contribute in solving civic matters encompassing frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing and design thinking

Analytics-Driven Digital Platform for Regional Growth and Development: A Case Study from Norway

In this paper, we present the growth barometer (Vekstbarometer in Norwegian), which is a digital platform that provides the development trends in the regional context in a visual and user-friendly way. The platform is developed to use open data from different sources that is presented mainly in five main groups: goals, premises or prerequisites for growth, industries, growth, and expectations. Furthermore, it also helps to improve decision-making and transparency, as well as provide new knowledge for research and society. The platform uses sensitive and non-sensitive open data. In contrast to other similar digital platforms from Norway, where the data is presented as raw data or with basic level of presentations, our platform is advantageous since it provides a range of options for visualization that makes the statistics more comprehensive.Comment: The Thirteenth International Conference on Digital Society and eGovernments (ICDS 2019

A theoretical model for the application of Web 2.0 in e-Government

Government organisations in many countries have started embracing modern technologies such as second generation web (Web 2.0) in an attempt to maximize on the benefits of these technologies as well as keeping up with the current trend. Nevertheless, the advancement and the adoption of these of technologies is in its initial stages in the public sector. Therefore, the research problem is that the literature surrounding the application of Web 2.0 is still highly tentative and exploratory. In particular, there is a lack of research exploring the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the context of local e-Government. This study aims to address this research problem by presenting a comprehensive decision-making tool to aid the effective application of Web 2.0 technologies amongst local government authorities (LGAs). In doing so, resulting in the development of a theoretical model that is underpinned by information systems evaluation criteria and impact factors of Web 2.0 from an internal organizational perspective. By addressing the research problem, this study will make a significant contribution to the normative literature by providing new insights of Web 2.0 technologies within the public sector. This will be of specific relevance to scholars, policy makers, LGAs and practitioners who are interested in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in an e-Government context. This paper presents the proposed theoretical model and is largely devoted to an explanation on the development of the model