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.

This article covers our findings on information behavior and dissemination of parliamentary decision-makers in terms of using Social Networking Sites like Facebook. The article investigates why politicians use those technologies and integrate them more and more in their everyday workflow. In addition to the purpose of social network usage, the focus of our paper is also on best practices and how to deal with challenges like authenticity of politicians’ online profiles. The results presented within the remit of this paper are the outcome of 16 semi-structured interviews that took place as part of an evaluation effort within the EU research project WeGov [1]. The overall aim of the project is to develop a toolbox that enriches the dialogue between citizens and politicians on the web.

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The role of social media in politics has increased considerably. A particular challenge is how to deal with the deluge of information generated on social media: it is impractical to read lots of messages with the hope of finding useful information. In this chapter, the authors suggest an alternative approach: utilizing analysis software to extract the most relevant information of the discussions taking place. This chapter discusses the WeGov Toolbox as one concept for policy-makers to deal with the information overload on Social Media, and how it may be applied. Two complementary, in depth case studies were carried out to validate the usefulness of the analysis results of the WeGov Toolbox components' within its target audience's everyday life. Firstly, the authors used the “HeadsUp” forum, operated by the Hansard Society. Here, they were able to compare the key themes and opinions extracted automatically by the Toolbox to a control group of manually pre-analyzed data sets. In parallel, results of analyses based on four weeks' intensive monitoring on policy area-specific Facebook pages selected by German policy makers, as well as topics on Twitter globally and local, were assessed by taking into account their existing experience with content discussed and user behavior in their respective public spheres. The cases show that there are interesting applications for policy-makers to use the Toolbox in combination with online forums (blogs) and social networks, if behavioral user patterns will be considered and the framework will be refined.