Engaging Politicians with Citizens on Social Networking Sites: The WeGov Toolbox

Governmental policy makers can use social networking sites to better engage with citizens. On the one hand social networking sites are well accepted by citizens and a familiar environment where discussions are already taking place and social networking sites are also more important for politicians. Thus, a need for information retrieval (the policy maker gathering information), dissemination (the policy maker broadcasting information) and two-way dialog between the policy maker and citizens over these platforms. The idea is to connect both the policy makers and the citizens. In fact social media is a mass medium and it’s difficult to sieve through multitudes of comments to get to the crux of a debate. The authors’ approach to address this is to use automatic analysis components to summarise and categorize text. To be able to place successful tools that can be used in the policy maker’s everyday life within the design process is important. This paper describes the phase of combining the policy makers’ requirements with the technical feasibility to develop a software prototype, where the analysis tools can be validated within the domain of policy makers and policymaking. This paper sets up the environment for evaluating this approach and to address the question of usefulness with respect to a dialogue with citizens.