Social Media and Government 2.0

2009

Government 2.0 Taskforce (Nicholas Gruen, Chair) KEY POINTS  Government 2.0 or the use of the new collaborative tools and approaches of Web 2.0 offers an unprecedented opportunity to achieve more open, accountable, responsive and efficient government.  Though it involves new technology, Government 2.0 is really about a new approach to organising and governing. It will draw people into a closer and more collaborative relationship with their government. Australia has an opportunity to resume its leadership in seizing these opportunities and capturing the resulting social and economic benefits.  Leadership, and policy and governance changes are needed to shift public sector culture and practice to make government information more accessible and usable, make government more consultative, participatory and transparent, build a culture of online innovation within Government, and to promote collaboration across agencies.  Government pervades some of the most important aspects of our lives. Government 2.0 can harness the wealth of local and expert knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm of Australians to improve schools, hospitals, workplaces, to enrich our democracy and to improve its own policies, regulation and service delivery. ___________________________ * First published as the Executive Summary and Recommendations in Engage-Getting on with Government 2.0 by the Government 2.0 Taskforce, www.gov2.net.au. The report is available at www.finance.gov.au/publications/gov20taskforcereport and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au. Members of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce were Dr Nicholas Gruen (Chair), Ms Ann Steward (Deputy Chair), Mr

Citizen 2.0: Public and Governmental Interaction through Web 2.0 Technologies

Social media is promising new opportunities across a broad spectrum of public services. As the Internet and its ubiquitous applications extend globally, an increasing number of governments and their public service agencies are embracing social media as one of the major mechanisms to interact with the public. Social media provides a new wave of Web-based applications and channels for citizens to share constructive ideas and opinions and play active roles in various areas in the public sector. At the same time, social media helps government organizations and elected officials of different government levels to actively listen to citizens and constantly monitor their existing services as well as develop new initiatives. Effective integration of Web 2.0 technologies and applications into existing Internet infrastructure adds visibility and accountability in the public sector and enhances services to citizens.

2000

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-topeer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation -it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead. Presenting such a paper at APPAM will provide us with an important opportunity to vet these ideas to a community of interested scholars, at the beginning stages of a major research program.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2012

This case study analysis to what extent the shift to Web 2.0 technologies required by the latest EU strategies is changing the delivery of public services? The following details present an overview of the consequences that Gov 2.0 technologies, embedded s at a practical level. The research draws upon an in depth study of the Gov 2.0 strategies of the European Union and specifically, four major European economies, namely: Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, our aims assess the extent of the shift from Gov 1.0 to Gov 2.0 technologies in the declared strategies of those aforementioned countries, and ascertaining the direct results between officially adopted strategies and actual practices put in place to foster public sector democracy.

Australia and New Zealand School of Government, 2013

Their project explores the concept of 21st century government as a ‘social machine’, with a focus on analysing the links between the rapid development of information and communications technologies and the accompanying organisational changes. It seeks to explain how governments around the world are using the Web, and more specifically ‘Web 2.0’ (i.e. technology that enables ‘read/write’ interactions between and among users), as a market-based policy instrument. The belief is that by engaging with citizens via these mechanisms, government agencies can more fully understand stakeholder needs; increase productivity; and reduce waste by more effectively and efficiently delivering targeted government services. The first report looks at the development of ideas such as 'Gov 2.0', 'social machine' and 'open government', tracing the development of the new technologies that will form the basis of the case studies to be discussed in the second report.

Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age, 2018

Social media is growing rapidly because it supports some important social needs. Government will need to understand how social media support these social needs if government is to use social media well. Social media supports the increased reliance on human networks, the need for rapid interactive communications, the need to blur what is private and public, and the need for engaging multimedia. Whether government can use social media will depend upon how well government can see, understand, and attend to these needs. Can government move from hierarchical, controlled communications to where it is just an (important) node within a network? Social media is about fast, interactive communications. How will bureaucracies adapt to the increased pressures for timely responses? Social media, therefore, presents novel and challenging strategic, policy, and managerial issues for many US governments. This paper reports on an environmental scan of the important issues facing US governments and th...

Digital Government: Research and Practice

The rise of social media offers governments at different levels and localities access to a variety of platforms and tools for public administration and for interaction with citizens and constituent organizations. Social media also support and facilitate citizens' and organizations' interactions with each other in efforts to share information and communicate about issues of interest, collective problem solving, and democratic governance. Studies of the use and impact of social media are part of the area of computing research known as social computing; that is, the intersection of social behavior (e.g., political science, psychology, communication, sociology, economics) and computational systems and software (e.g., computer science). The study of government, public administration, democracy, and technology is rooted in these disciplines. The benefits of the communication technology of social media derive from their affordances for direct communication, empowerment, and crowdsourcing among users in response to routines of daily life, as well as to big challenges, such as long-term municipal planning, regional and global environmental crises, and social change. By means of social media, channels such as micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter), social network sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), and other user-generated content and markup tools, governments, citizens, businesses, and voluntary associations share information, ask questions, and compete or collaborate on problem-solving within and among neighborhoods, industries, states, and nations. Social media are used, among other channels, to broadcast information, promote perspectives and policies, and to garner (or sometimes disrupt) support for collective action. The staggering number and diversity of messages and topics generated by users make it difficult for all entities-government, organizations, citizens-to process and make sense of vast amounts of disparate and unstructured information, images, and sentiments, especially for non-technical users. Analyses of communication behavior (such as information sharing), trends, and message content by all parties should help contribute to our knowledge of the ways the use of social media are affecting collective problem-solving, public administration, and social structures. Empirical research of actual use of social media contributes to our understanding of the challenges and benefits of social media use in the public domain. In their article titled "MPs on FB: Differences between members of coalition and opposition," authors Nili Steinfeld and Azi Lev-On analyze the content of the Facebook (FB) pages of all members of the 19 th Israeli Parliament or Knesset (2013-15). They find differences in communication behavior between coalition and opposition MPs on multiple measures, including: scope of publication, scope of user engagement, content, and format.

IGI Global eBooks, 2020

This chapter explores the use of social media applications by local governments to communicate with constituents and promote involvement in policy and project management activities. Although public and private sector organizations make different uses of social media (Halverson, Hauknes, Miles, & Røste, 2005), there are many ways for government and nonprofit entities to make use of Web 2.0 applications. The focus in this chapter is on local government and a variety of examples will be provided. Some local government agencies primarily provide information to constituents through the social media apps, while others solicit the input from citizens to expand involvement. Finally, suggestions for future research and uses will be discussed.