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2015 | Book

Affordances and Effects of Promoting eParticipation Through Social Media Read chapter Read first chapter

Electronic Participation

7th IFIP 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2015, Thessaloniki, Greece, August 30 -- September 2, 2015, Proceedings

Editors: Efthimios Tambouris, Panos Panagiotopoulos, Øystein Sæbø, Konstantinos Tarabanis, Maria A. Wimmer, Michela Milano, Theresa Pardo

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2015, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in August/September 2015.

The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: eParticipation and social media, delibration and consultation, evaluation, and policy formulation and modelling.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

eParticipation and Social Media

Frontmatter
Affordances and Effects of Promoting eParticipation Through Social Media
Abstract
A growing body of literature highlights the adoption of social media for eParticipation, focusing on the identification of processes and structures through which ICT supports the relationship between citizens, governments and public bodies. There is a need to better understand the role of technology in such initiatives. This paper addresses this issue by introducing the concept of affordance. We used a case study approach to investigate an Indonesian eParticipation projects from Bandung, identifying affordance perceptions, enabling and inhibiting factors, actualized affordances and affordances effects. From the use of social media we identify nine actualized affordances and their effects, and we discuss the relationship between them. The case introduces findings from a developing country, a context that has largely been ignored within eParticipation research. Our findings provide lessons learned for practitioners on how to organize their eParticipation projects, as well as for researchers identifying future research avenues to strengthen our understanding of the role of ICT by introducing the concept of affordances.
Fathul Wahid, Øystein Sæbø
Please Like and Share! A Frame Analysis of Opinion Articles in Online News
Abstract
In this paper, I apply framing theory to the online newspaper opinion articles that were most shared and most liked in social media in 2014. The articles were published in two of Norway’s largest and most influential online newspapers; Dagbladet.no and Aftenposten.no. Frame analysis makes visible how people define and construct a given issue, and as such can provide valuable input on how to write when you want a topic put on the political agenda. The findings show that the most popular opinion articles have one common theme: They are written in a personal tone, and aimed at our private sphere. The paper concludes by discussing what this means for agenda setting and for the public sphere.
Marius Rohde Johannessen
The Influence of Social Media on Social Movements: An Exploratory Conceptual Model
Abstract
Information and communication technology affects all issues in the modern world, including social movements. The impact of these technologies on such movements has been felt worldwide in recent years, affecting both developed countries, such as Spain and the United States, as well as developing countries, such as Brazil, Egypt, and Tunisia. Interestingly, the intensive use of the Internet and especially social media has been a common denominator in the popular demonstrations that have occurred in the past few years in the most diverse scenarios. Social movements appear to have been influenced by social media, particularly with respect to their organization and communication. Therefore, based on a review of the extant literature on the topic, this paper seeks to propose an exploratory conceptual model about the influence of the use of social media on social movements, whereby possible scenarios in which these social demonstrations tend to occur can be identified.
Carla Danielle Monteiro Soares, Luiz Antonio Joia

Deliberation and Consultation

Frontmatter
e-Consultation Platforms: Generating or Just Recycling Ideas?
Abstract
A number of governments worldwide employ web-based e-consultation platforms to enable stakeholders commenting on draft legislation. Stakeholders’ input includes arguing in favour or against the proposed legislation as well as proposing alternative ideas. In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between the volume of contributions in these platforms and the amount of new ideas that are generated. This enables us to determine whether participants in such platforms keep generating new ideas or just recycle a finite number of ideas. We capitalised on argumentation models to code and analyse a large number of draft law consultations published in opengov.gr, the official e-consultation platform for draft legislation in Greece. Our results suggest that as the number of posts grows, the number of new ideas continues to increase. The results of this study improve our understanding of the dynamics of these consultations and enable us to design better platforms.
Efthimios Tambouris, Anastasia Migotzidou, Konstantinos Tarabanis
Equality of Participation Online Versus Face to Face: Condensed Analysis of the Community Forum Deliberative Methods Demonstration
Abstract
Online deliberation may provide a more cost-effective and/or less inhibiting environment for public participation than face to face (F2F). But do online methods bias participation toward certain individuals or groups? We compare F2F versus online participation in an experiment affording within-participants and cross-modal comparisons. For English speakers required to have Internet access as a condition of participation, we find no negative effects of online modes on equality of participation (EoP) related to gender, age, or educational level. Asynchronous online discussion appears to improve EoP for gender relative to F2F. Data suggest a dampening effect of online environments on black participants, as well as amplification for whites. Synchronous online voice communication EoP is on par with F2F across individuals. But individual-level EoP is much lower in the online forum, and greater online forum participation predicts greater F2F participation for individuals. Measured rates of participation are compared to self-reported experiences, and other findings are discussed.
Eric Showers, Nathan Tindall, Todd Davies
A Knowledge Extraction and Management Component to Support Spontaneous Participation
Abstract
Harnessing spontaneous contributions of citizens on Social Media and networking sites is a major feature of the next generation citizen-led e-Participation paradigm. However, extracting information of interest from Social Media streams is a challenging task and requires support from domain specific language resources such as lexica. This work describes our efforts at developing a Knowledge Extraction and Management component which employs a lexicon for extracting information related to public services in Social Media contents or streams as part of a holistic technology infrastructure for citizen-led e-Participation. Our approach consists of three basic steps – (1) acquisition and refinement of public service catalogues, (2) organization of the public service names into a lexicon based on different semantic similarity measures and (3) development of a dictionary-based Named Entity Recognizer (NER) or “spotter” based on the lexicon. We evaluate the performance of the NER solution supported by contextual information generated by two well-known general-purpose information NER tools (DBpedia Spotlight and Alchemy) on a dataset of tweets. Results show that our strategy to domain specific information extraction from Social Media is effective. We conclude with a scenario on how our approach could be scaled-up to extract other types of information from citizen discussions on Social Media.
Lukasz Porwol, Islam Hassan, Adegbojega Ojo, John Breslin
Towards Continuous Collaboration on Civic Tech Projects: Use Cases of a Goal Sharing System Based on Linked Open Data
Abstract
Civic hackathon is a participatory event for prototyping of innovative services through collaboration between citizens and engineers towards addressing social issues. Although continuous contributions are needed for improving the prototypes and for applying them to social issues, participants frequently stop contributions after the hackathon due to their day job. To address this problem, we applied our Web system, called GoalShare, which gathers linked open data (LOD) of hierarchical goals to address social issues, to civic hackathons held in the city of Nagoya in Japan. We compared goal structures between two situations. The results showed that goal structures input by team members themselves with enough instruction time were relatively detailed but varied widely among teams, and those input by a single GoalShare user with limited time remained at a simple overview level but had uniform level of detail. A more user-friendly interface usable without instruction is required for real-world situations.
Shun Shiramatsu, Teemu Tossavainen, Tadachika Ozono, Toramatsu Shintani

Evaluation

Frontmatter
Citizen-to-Citizen vs. Citizen-to-Government eParticipation in Uganda: Implications for Research and Practice
Abstract
The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is growing globally, as is interest in the use of digital technologies to improve citizens’ participation in governance. In African countries, where ICT use remains low and where there is a democratic deficit, the nature and extent of citizens’ participation via ICT is unknown. Based on a print questionnaire with 322 internet users in Uganda, this paper compares citizen-to-citizen (C2C) participation and citizen-to-government (C2G) participation, examines the factors that hinder greater C2C and C2G online participation, and explores the implications for greater eParticipation in future. For effective eParticipation, the majority of Ugandan internet users need to become more active as creators of online content, as well as conversationalists and critics. Results show that regardless of whether it is engagements among citizens or between citizens and leaders, most citizens are spectators.
Wairagala Wakabi, Åke Grönlund
Identification in E-Participation: Between Quality of Identification Data and Participation Threshold
Abstract
E-participation projects have to consider a low participation threshold while maintaining security and data quality standards. While users often perceive complex regulations and logins as hurdles for participation, providers of solutions want to avoid misuse and in some cases have identified the participants uniquely. Not all levels of e-participation require the same quality of identification and authentication to produce reliable outcomes. Based on the first results of an Austrian e-participation project, the paper presents a model that tries to match these complex relations and examines which identification methods are seen as appropriate on which levels of e-participation based on the dimensions of quality of identification data and low participation threshold.
Peter Parycek, Judith Schossböck, Bettina Rinnerbauer
Social-Economic Approach to an eParticipation Experience Based on eCognocracy
Abstract
Most eParticipation initiatives have social, economic and environmental costs, financed in most cases with public funds, so it would be convenient to evaluate them in order to be transparent and consistent with the strategic objectives pursued. Thus, it is necessary to quantify, monetarily, both the economic, social and environmental aspects, and the value added generated by the practical application of this type of eParticipation initiatives. The main objective of this paper is to value, in monetary terms, the social and economic aspects of the implementation and development of an eParticipation experience based on eCognocracy. This evaluation will allow us to obtain the social and economic information as to the true value added that these initiatives contribute to society in general, and to give an appropriate answer to the new challenges and necessities in the sphere of public decisions that arise within the Knowledge Society.
Cristina Pérez-Espés, José María Moreno-Jiménez

Policy Formulation and Modelling

Frontmatter
Modeling for Policy Formulation: Causal Mapping, Scenario Generation, and Decision Evaluation
Abstract
In this paper we present a work process with associated operational research modeling and analysis tools for the policy formulation stage of the Lindblom policy cycle process model. The approach exploits the use of causal maps for problem structuring and scenario generation of policy options together with decision analysis for evaluating generated scenarios taking preferences of decision makers and stakeholders into account. The benefits of interest when exploiting this integrated modeling approach is to enable for; (i) problem structuring and facilitating understanding and communication of a complex policy problem, (ii) simulation of policy consequences and identification of a smaller set of policy options from a possible very large set of possible options, and (iii) structured decision evaluation of the generated alternative policy options.
Aron Larsson, Osama Ibrahim
Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis in Policy Formulation Initiatives: The EU-Community Approach
Abstract
In the last decade there is extensive and continuously growing creation of political content in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, which can be quite useful for government agencies in order to understand the needs and problems of societies and formulate effective public policies for addressing them. So a variety of ICT-based methods have been developed for the exploitation of this political content by governments (‘citizensourcing’), initially simpler and later more sophisticated ones. These ICT-based methods are increasingly based on the use of opinion mining (OM) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques, in order to process the extensive political content collected from numerous sources. This paper describes a novel approach to OM and SA use, created as part of an advanced ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts (‘expertsourcing’), aiming to leverage the extensive policy community of the European Union, which is developed in the European EU-Community project. Furthermore, some first experimental results of it are presented.
Yannis Charalabidis, Manolis Maragoudakis, Euripides Loukis
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Electronic Participation
Editors
Efthimios Tambouris
Panos Panagiotopoulos
Øystein Sæbø
Konstantinos Tarabanis
Maria A. Wimmer
Michela Milano
Theresa Pardo
Copyright Year
2015
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-22500-5
Print ISBN
978-3-319-22499-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22500-5

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