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Using Social Networking Platforms for eParticipation
Lukasz Porwol
DERI
lukasz.porwol@deri.org
Abstract
Recently we can observe a massive growth of
participation of electronic forms of governing at
multiple stages and among multiple levels of state
policy making around the world. Terms like
eGovernment, which involves eParticipation, eVoting
and other branches, are becoming more and more
popular. We can observe a natural trend to utilize
modern technology to enhance state policy making
process[1]. We would like to present a way to realize
eDeliberation concepts over popular social networking
platforms, taking advantage of the great society reach
and engagement of the platforms.
1. Introduction
Citizen Participation becomes harder and
harder while the complexity and number of state
policies grows constantly. Citizens face large number of
institutional and psychological barriers[2]. Well-known
democratic models such as Liberal, Republican or
classic Aggregative model don’t seem to be sufficient
anymore. The Deliberative model, which focuses on
opinion-formation processes and is built over web
technologies is considered the golden solution for the
future of policy making[3].
2. eParticipation
eParticipation as a part of eGovernment is
considered to be one of the key tools to provide
effective state to citizens communication, which is
demanded by Deliberative democracy model. Decision
makers are encouraging discussions where citizens are
presenting their opinions and solutions for posted
issues. Constructive feedback provided by the society
and policy change management leads to a deliberative
style of governing and as a result introduces some
elements of deliberative democracy.
3. Dedicated ePart Solutions vs. Social
Networking Platforms
Multiple projects have been funded around the
globe. Several European Union initiatives led to
creation of platforms for eVoting and eParcitipation.
Even though solutions were well designed with high
relevancy of the structure and the content, still most of
them seem to suffer from serious sustainability
problems and lack of engagement from the society[1].
In contrary, the Social Networking Platforms
experience a real golden era with exponential growth in
the number of active users. Reports from UK and
Australia reveal that Social Network Traffic started to
92
Dr. Alexandre Passant
DERI
alexandre.passant@deri.org
overtake popular search engines visits, thus becoming a
very powerful medium that has to be taken under
consideration by decision makers. The popular
platforms are well established, present good
sustainability and, being ubiquitous, engage a wide
range of people by reaching most of the digitally
included society. As Social Networking Platforms seem
to miss the main eParticipation platforms issues it is
reasonable to make a thesis that merging those two
solutions could potentially be very beneficial.
4. eDeliberation over Social Networking
Platform
We present some ideas and contributions towards
bringing eParticipation, in particular eDeliberation,
elements to Social networking Platforms such as
Facebook or Twitter. We take advantage of a great
reach and engagement provided by these platforms and
combine them with eParticipation solution’s principles
using state of the art Semantic Web technologies. Like
this broad society could easily and effectively interact
with decision makers at every stage of the policymaking
process.
We will first investigate how existing platforms such
as Facebook or Twitter can be used for eParticipation
and identify missing elements for possibly complete
eDeliberation over these platforms.
We will define relevant expansions for the platform and
Semantic Web based mechanisms for effective data
interchange to support easy exploration of deliberation
data. Finally we will elaborate on browsing and
visualization techniques to present gathered data in a
valuable and useful form for decision makers.
5. References
[1] A. Macintosh. Characterizing e-participation in policymaking.
In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS’04) - Track 5 - Volume 5, pages 50117.1–,
Washington, DC, USA, 2004. IEEE Computer Society.
[2] E. Brodie, E. Cowling, N. Nissen, A. E. Paine, V. Jochum,
and D. Warburton. Understanding participation: A literature
review. 2009
[3] R. Kies. Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
[4] J. G. Breslin, A. Passant, and S. Decker. The Social
Semantic Web. Springer, 1 edition, October 2009.
.
6. Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper has been funded in
part by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No.
SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Lion-2).