| Abstract: | Governments of many countries attempt to increase public participation by exploiting the
capabilities and high penetration of the Internet. In this direction they make considerable
investments for constructing and operating e-participation websites; however, the use of them
has been in general limited and below expectations. For this reason governments, in order to
widen e-participation, should investigate the exploitation of the numerous users-driven Web
2.0 social media as well, which seem to be quite successful in attracting huge numbers of
users. This paper describes a methodology for the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media by
government organizations in the processes of public policies formulation, through a central
platform-toolset providing interoperability with many different social media, and enabling
posting and retrieving content from them in a systematic centrally managed and machinesupported
automated manner (through their application programming interfaces (APIs)). The
proposed methodology includes the use of ‘Policy Gadgets’ (Padgets), which are defined as
micro web applications presenting policy messages in various popular Web 2.0 social media
(e.g. social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) and collecting users’ interactions with
them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). Interaction data can be used as input in
policy simulation models estimating the impact of various policy options. Encouraging have
been the conclusions from the analysis of the APIs of 10 highly popular social media, which
provide extensive capabilities for publishing content on them (e.g. data, images, video, links,
etc.) and also for retrieving relevant user activity and content (e.g. views, comments, ratings,
votes, etc.), though their continuous evolution might pose significant difficulties and
challenges. |
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Greek