| Abstract: | The Web 2.0 social media have been initially exploited by private sector firms, in order to support mainly their marketing and customer relations functions, and there has been considerable research for developing frameworks and practices for the effective utilization of these new communication media in the private sector. Government started exploiting the high capabilities and popularity of the social media much later, so there has been much less research concerning their effective utilization by government agencies. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, presenting a novel framework for the effective utilization of the Web 2.0 social media by government agencies for promoting participative governance and applying crowdsourcing ideas. It is based on the centralised automated publishing of content and micro-applications to multiple Web 2.0 social media, and then collection of citizens’ interactions (e.g. comments, ratings) with them, based on central platform that uses efficiently the application programming interfaces (APIs) of these social media. Finally, citizens’ interactions are processed in this central platform using a variety of techniques (web analytics, opinion mining, simulation modelling) in order to provide finally useful analytics that offer substantial support to government decision and policy makers. Furthermore, an application and an evaluation model for the proposed framework are described, as well as an extension of it that combines active/moderated and passive/non-moderated crowdsourcing. |
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Greek