| Abstract: | Government agencies are making considerable investments for exploiting the capabilities offered by
ICT, and especially the Internet, to increase citizens’ engagement in their decision and policy making
processes. However, this first generation of e-participation has been characterised by limited usage of
the ‘official’ e-consultation spaces of government agencies by the citizens. The emergence of Web 2.0
social media offers big opportunities for overcoming this problem, and proceeding to a second
generation of broader, deeper and more advanced e-participation. This paper presents a methodology
for the efficient exploitation of Web 2.0 social media by government agencies in order to broaden and
enhance e-participation. It is based on a central platform which enables posting content and deploying
micro web applications (‘Policy Gadgets’-Padgets) to multiple popular Web 2.0 social media, and
also collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings) in an efficient manner
using their application programming interfaces (API). These interactions’ data undergo various levels
of processing, such as calculation of useful analytics, opinion mining and simulation modelling, in
order to provide effective support to public decision and policy makers. The proposed methodology
allows government agencies to adopt advanced and highly effective ‘hybrid’ e-participation
approaches. |
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Greek