Social media monitoring, which promises several advantages such as early warning and reputation management, is gradually becoming common practice in public organizations in the Netherlands. From a citizen's point of view, it can contribute to the responsiveness of public policies. However, social media monitoring also poses questions in terms of transparency and privacy. This paper investigates four cases of social media monitoring by Dutch public organizations. Policy departments are more strongly orientated towards monitoring, whereas organizations involved in policy implementation seem to be more inclined to progress to webcare. The paper argues for more transparency on social media monitoring.

This paper investigates the monitoring of parliamentarians by independent parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs). Three parliamentary monitoring websites (PMWs) in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France are compared regarding their contribution to strengthening democracy. An information ecology perspective reveals the interrelationships between the national institutional context, the democratic values pursued by the initiators, and website design. Two types of PMWs can be distinguished. One type focuses on enabling citizens to discharge their monitorial role, whereas the other type combines this focus with an explicit reformist stance. PMWs seem to have positive effects on various aspects of transparency and accountability. However, a better understanding is needed about what these websites entail for the quality of parliamentary work.

Web 2.0 applications gain in importance in today's society and cannot be ignored by the public sector, because they can take the evolution of E-Government in new directions. These developments raise some questions we will try to answer in this paper: • What is the context in which E-Government and Web 2.0 can be placed? • What kind of Web 2.0 applications can be found in the Netherlands and what are the characteristics and functions of these applications? • What are the expected opportunities and threats of Web 2.0 for the public sector?) First, we explore the notions of E-Government and Web 2.0 and discuss these concepts in the broader context of two developments that are increasingly being interwoven with each other, namely societal-technological developments and the evolution of a different physical and a new virtual world. We state that the focal point of these two developments is the so-called Second Society. Against this background we present a framework to classify Web 2.0 applications, namely a classification based on distinguishable characteristics (generic versus specific; static versus dynamic; closed versus open and personal versus collective) and the functions that the applications fulfill (sharing of information, mobilisation, meeting, supporting and transactions). Then we will discuss six Dutch examples of Web 2.0 applications and put them in the classification framework. We discuss the opportunities and threats of Web 2.0 to the public sector as well. We conclude our paper by stating that Web 2.0 applications can be seen as a new basis for E-Government. When we consider the investigated Dutch examples we can conclude that Web 2.0 applications have much potential for the public sector in terms of interaction, participation and transparency. However, when we take into account the four developing stages of E-Government (presence, interaction, transaction and transformation), we have to conclude that none of the investigated Dutch examples has transaction or transformation characteristics. So it is still too early to speak about a virtual state. In order to realize these final two stages of E-Government, it is important to take into account the potential risks of Web 2.0 applications (isolation, exclusion, privacy and risks of misuse of information).

Open government has become a prominent issue for governments in recent years. Many studies focus on the data published by governments (supply) instead of on the needs of potential users (demand). In this study, we investigated the perceived impact of open data provided by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education. The research question is what is the perceived impact of open inspection data, as used by parents, on the quality of education in Dutch primary schools? The empirical data have been gathered by both surveys and interviews. The results of the surveys show that both the factual use and the perceived usefulness of the Inspectorate's open data are relatively low. Parents want all individuals and institutions, in general, to have more influence on the quality of primary education. The results also indicate that the increasingly frequent visits to the Inspectorate of Education's website are linked to parents' desire to have more influence on the quality of primary education. Finally, as parents are more involved in the schools or visit the Inspectorate's website more often, they want the participation councils to have more influence. Nevertheless, Dutch parents highly estimate the average quality of the education provided by primary schools. However, when their involvement increases, their assessments of their school's performance decrease. Frequent visits to the Inspectorate's website are related to lower performance assessments. So, open inspection data are potentially valuable for (critical) parents, especially when attention is also paid to ''soft'' quality indicators.

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