| Abstract: | There has been significant research and practice oriented
towards the rational exploitation of the rapidly expanding
social media by private sector enterprises. However, much
less research and practice have been done in this area with
respect to the public sector. This paper explores advanced
forms of rational exploitation of social media in government
policy-making processes, aiming to strengthen and widen
participation of and interaction with citizens, concerning new
or existing public policies and services. The proposed approach
is based on a platform, which can publish policy-related
content and micro-applications towards multiple social media
simultaneously, also collect data on citizens’ interaction with
them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.), using the
application programming interfaces (API) of the targeted social
media. The information gathered through social media will
then undergo various types of advanced processing (e.g. access
analytics, opinion mining, simulation modelling) in order to
extract synthetic conclusions from them and provide substantial
support to government policy-makers, always respecting data
privacy guidelines. In addition, an extension of this ‘stimulated/
guided crowdsourcing’ approach is presented, based on ‘nonmoderated
crowdsourcing’ by government agencies. The above
approaches allow a more advanced and rational exploitation
of social media by government for supporting evidence-based
decision and policy making. |
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Greek