WeGov is a recently started three-year project supported by the European Commission aiming at the development of new tools allowing policy makers to interact with citizens and to understand their opinions by using well established public SNS – Social networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
WeGov will harness the potential of the SNS by making it possible to introduce, detect, track and consider opinions and discussions on policy oriented topics including their origins, bias and evolution. Beyond this, WeGov will deliver software components having the potentiality to be deployed on cloud infrastructure to drastically lower the cost of the operations.
Policy Context
The success of the SNS throughout the society provides unprecedented opportunities for policy makers (eGovernment) to engage with citizens (eSociety) through existing, open, well used and familiar settings. This is in stark contrast with the more common approach of using dedicated, ad-hoc, constrained and very often underestimated opinion soliciting platforms. WeGov will develop tools and techniques for closing the goop between policy makers and citizens.
Description of target users and groups
The project's target group includes citizens and policy makers. WeGov will develop a toolset that allows taking full advantage of a wide range of existing and well established Social networking Sites to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of the governance and policymaking processes.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
Three live field trials will be conducted by the Hansard Society in the UK, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) in Germany, and by Government to You in Greece. The trial results will be combined into a methodology, inclusive of a legal and ethical analysis and review by The Institute for Law and the Web at Southampton, and input from an international project Advisory Board.
Technology solution
WeGov will develop a toolset that allows taking advantage of a wide range of existing and well established social networking sites to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policymaking processes.
The tools will stimulate the discussion by introducing relevant policy topics to the appropriate communities in a secure and organised way. The tools will allow tracking the origins, bias and evolution of the opinions, providing therefore records to verify their proveniences and to protect them against misuse; the system will at the same time ensure trust and privacy for all parties involved.
Technology choice: Mainly (or only) open standards, Open source softwareMain results, benefits and impacts
WeGov will develop tools and techniques for reducing the gap between policy makers and citizen.
Lessons learnt
The project has just started, therefore at the present phase there are no sufficient data allowing us to evaluate how can policy-makers improve the level of their collaboration with citizens with the use of the SNS; in the same way, it is early to estimate how can WeGov allow SNS to be an efficient tool for policy discussions by reducing the effort required by the manual tracking of conversations and the monitoring of topics and opinions across multiple sites.
Scope: Pan-European