icegov2012 proceedings

Social Media Usage Guidelines for the Government of the
United Arab Emirates
ABSTRACT
In this poster, we present the experience of Emirates eGovernment
in designing social media usage guidelines for government
organizations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We highlight
the local context by focusing on social media adoption by the
government and citizens, and describe the process we followed
when designing the guidelines and the key policy issues we
covered in the document. We conclude with a set of
recommendations for other government agencies planning to go
through a similar process.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.5.2 [Legal Aspects of Computing]: Government Issues –
Regulation.
General Terms
Legal Aspects
Keywords
Social Media, e-Government, United Arab Emirates
1. INTRODUCTION
In an attempt to clearly describe the growing impact of social
media and Web 2.0 technologies on the government sector, this
technology revolution is described as one of the “four new forces
that enable the transformation of government” in addition to
demographic, social, and business revolutions [11]. The
interactive and pervasive nature of social media, and its instant
capabilities, can create new ways of “democratic participation,
pressures for new institutional structures, processes and
frameworks for open and transparent government on an
unprecedented scale” [1]. A similar conclusion was provided by
[8], who discussed how social media can promote citizen
participation in governments’ decision making and process design
and help improve democratic practices in general.
But the growing use of social media raises many challenges
related to governing its use and the related legal impacts. Most of
the laws that govern the use of social media in the US government
were written prior to its existence [2]. According to [5], any social
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Elbadawi, Ibrahim
Telecommunications Regulatory Authority
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Ibrahim.elbadawi@gia.gov.ae
508
media policy should cover eight essential elements: employee
access, account management, acceptable use, employee conduct,
content, security, legal issues, and citizen conduct. Motivated by
similar needs, the eGovernment and Information Sector within the
Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (the government body
responsible for the federal eGovernment program; website
http://www.emiratesegov.ae) has developed comprehensive social
media usage guidelines for all government entities in the UAE [4].
1.1 eGovernment in the UAE
The UAE is a federation of seven emirates with a federal
government of over 50 entities, most of which provide public
services, and a local government within each of the seven emirates
[3]. The eGovernment program in the UAE has achieved
remarkable success in enabling the technology-based transformation
of public services. According to [10], the UAE is ranked 6 th globally
in the eParticipation Index, 7 th in the Online Service Index, and 28 th
in the eGovernment Development Index.
1.2 Social Media in the UAE
Social media is widely adopted among citizens of the UAE;
40.6% of its population has active Facebook accounts, which is
the highest rate among all Arab countries [7].
Government agencies and officials are increasingly establishing
their presence on one or more social media sites. His Highness
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and
Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, offers a role
model for government officials. He is very popular on Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube and he uses these channels to continuously
communicate with the public and consult them on new ideas and
initiatives. Government employees in the UAE consider social
networking among the top technologies that could increase the
level of collaboration across the government [9].
The UAE is considered among the developing countries that have
managed to catch up with the developed countries as e-Leaders
with the use of consultation tools, including social media [10].
2. SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE GUIDELINES
In this section, we illustrate the process used to design the UAE
government’s social media usage guidelines, describe the key
policy issues covered in the guidelines, and provide a set of
recommendations for other government organizations planning to
develop a similar document.
2.1 The Design Process
The policy guidelines document was prepared collaboratively
between May 2010 and March 2011 by a task force that brought
together representatives of the government sector, academic