Social Media in Government and Administration: Citizen Participation, Value Co-Creation and Service Delivery

Minitrack Description

The use of social media by public agencies and citizens has now become mainstream. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat represent global tools that bring in the potential to transform the interaction between government agencies, businesses, and citizens.

Social media is, in fact, potentially not only just another channel of information exchange between government agencies and users, but also a powerful tool for service delivery, a device of citizen participation, and an arena of public deliberation.

However, while the vast majority of observers acknowledge the potential of social media in government, there is still a strong need for unpacking some of the core phenomena established by social media in government at local, regional, or central level.

On the one hand, social media carries the promise of increased government transparency, a more active citizen participation through e.g., citizen-sourcing, or social media-enabled value co-creation with businesses. But how intense is citizen participation really?

On the other hand, many issues related to privacy, information leakage, blurred boundaries between private and public spheres, and government surveillance, must all be urgently addressed. Is there a need to clarify the challenges about social media? Should an awareness be developed in the population?

This minitrack aims at attracting high-quality research papers investigating various aspects of social media use, both by citizens (e.g., information, opinions and ideas exchange, political action and mobilization), and by government agencies (e.g., information dissemination, transparency improvement, collection of feedback, knowledge, experience and creative ideas, promotion of citizens’ participation, value and service co-creation). We welcome papers adopting a wide range of approaches on content, metrics, case studies, or theoretical models to advance this area of research.

Minitrack topics include, but are not limited to:

• Social media and government information sharing and transparency
• Social media and citizen participation
• Social media and citizen value co-creation
• Social media and government services delivery
• Evaluation of government social media practices
• Citizen political discussion and mobilization on social media
• Relationship between online social media use and offline political action
• Predicting election and other political events using social media content
• Government social media policy and implementation challenges
• Government social media and privacy
• Social media and information overload
• Social media use for public agencies’ internal activities
• Social media use in public-private networks
• Social media and awareness

More information on the mini-track chairs:

Rony Medaglia is an Associate Professor at the Department of IT Management (ITM) at the Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark. His research focus is on digital technologies in the public sphere, e-Government and IT in the public sector. He has authored publications in international journals and conferences, including Government Information Quarterly, Journal of Information Technology, Information, Communication and Society, the International Journal of Public Administration, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA). [webpage: http://www.cbs.dk/en/staff/rmitm]

Margit Scholl, Ph.D., is Professor for Business Informatics and Administrative IT at the Faculty of Business, Computing, Law of the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau (TUASW) in the east-south of Berlin in Brandenburg. Objects of interest are:

• Project management, including e-government and international orientation
• Process management, including acceptance and quality management, risk management and change management
• Business applications such as enterprise resource planning systems and document management systems (eAkte)
• Multimedia, including learning technologies and virtuality and intercultural aspects IT security, IT baseline protection and information security awareness.

Moreover her research focuses are IT and didactics, infrastructures for promoting learning, individual and organizational learning, digital media in education, PPBBL (Problem and Project Based Blended Learning).

Publications: https://publister.bib.th-wildau.de/publister/public/publist/filter/author/62

Projects: http://www.th-wildau.de/index.php?id=978&order=name#mscholl

Euripidis Loukis, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Decision Support Systems at the Department of Information & Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean. He has extensive research activity in the areas of e-Government, e-Participation, ICT business value and impact, cloud adoption and business value, and decision support systems. Dr Euripidis Loukis is the author of numerous scientific articles in international journals and conferences, and also book chapters, in the above areas. One of his papers has been honored with the International Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), while another has been received the best paper award of the European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS). He has participated in numerous national and european research projects in the above areas. Also, he has an extensive professional experience as Information Systems Advisor at the Ministry to the Presidency of the Government of Greece (1991-2002), which is responsible the central management and coordination of ICTs usage in the Greek Public Sector. He has served as Scientific Director of the Program of Modernization of Public Administration of the Second European Community Support Framework, ICT Advisor of the Ministry of Culture and Sports for ICTs issues, and National Representative of Greece in the programs "Telematics" and "IDA" (Interchange of Data between Admnistrations) of the European Union.