Systematically exploiting web 2.0 social media in government for extending communication with citizens

Governments of many countries have been for long time attempting to establish communications with citizens in order to understand better their problems and needs, benefit from their collective knowledge, and promote public participation and transparency in their decision making and policy formulation processes. For this purpose they exploited initially the Web 1.0, making considerable investments in developing official e-participation websites, but the results were below expectations; so recently government agencies started exploiting the emerging Web 2.0 social media, which offers big opportunities for interacting with the large numbers of users these media attract. This chapter contributes in this direction by presenting a methodology for the systematic and centrally managed exploitation of Web 2.0 social media by government agencies for extending their communication with citizens. It is based on a central platform providing interoperability with many different Web 2.0 social media, which enables posting and retrieving content from them in a systematic centrally managed and automated manner using their application programming interfaces (APIs). It also allows the deployment in various popular Web 2.0 social media of Policy Gadgets (Padgets), which are micro Web applications presenting policy messages and collecting users' interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). The two basic critical success factors of this methodology, interoperability with Web 2.0 social media and composition of their users' base, are also discussed.