| Abstract: | This paper describes the research concerning the systematic, intensive and centralized web 2.0 social media
exploitation by government agencies for widening and enhancing participative public policy making, which is
conducted as part of the research project PADGETS (‘Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge
in Web 2.0 Media’) partially funded by the European Commission. The proposed approach is based on a central
system, which publishes various types of policy-related content (e.g., short text long text, images, video) and
micro-applications in multiple social media simultaneously, and also collects from them and processes data
on citizens’ interactions (e.g., views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). This poses difficult research questions
and challenges, both technical (analysis and exploitation of social media application programming interfaces
(APIs), appropriate design of the central system architecture, processing and integrating the large amounts
of collected citizens’ interaction data) and also non-technical (investigation of the value generated by this
approach, preconditions for its effective application by government agencies), which are researched in the
project. Some first findings on them are presented and discussed. |
|---|
Greek