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In the Web 2.0 era, consumers of media are no longer mere recipients of digital content, but rather active commentators and cocreators online. However, the Internet rule predicts that 90% of users are passive ‘lurkers’, 9% edit content, and 1% actually create content. This study investigates Finns’ social media activities that apply to content creation, as well as the level of content engagement and sharing. The data come from Statistics Finland and are representative of the Finnish population between the ages of 16 and 74. The results show that Finnish users perceive themselves predominantly as occasional commentators of social media posts. Dissecting the social media activities users engage in, commenting posts is the most popular activity. Gender, age, and education best explain the differences between the types of social media activities investigated. Overall, the study shows that Finns actively engage in different types of online activities as well as the pervasiveness of sociodemographic variables in Finland.

Part 3: ImplementationsInternational audienceThis paper reports results on presumably the first city-wide mobile participation trial (Living Lab) examining citizen participation in urban planning, conducted in Turku, Finland, in 2015. The questions examined are the socio-economic characteristics of the application users, as well as their motivations to participate. The inclusion of online participation has been discussed widely in literature on e-participation and the digital divide, arguing for a great influence of socio-economic factors, interest in the topic, and users’ online skills. The results reveal that this application, too, was used predominantly by young adults and middle-aged, highly educated, and technology savvy citizens, who were already interested in urban planning. Their use of the application was motivated primarily by the opportunity to bring their own ideas and issues to the city authorities’ attention, rather than participating in missions given by the municipality or discussing planning issues with fellow citizens, indicating a rather individualistic usage interest. The location-based features and ease of use of a mobile application were valued highly. Those who idled reported predominantly technical challenges with the app

Balancing between online-offline stages of participatory procedures is a delicate art that may support or hinder the success of participatory democracy. Participatory budgeting (PB), in particular, is generally rooted in online platforms, but as our case study on the City of Helsinki PB trial suggests, face-toface events are necessary to engage targeted and often times less resourceful actors in the process. Based on a longer-term participant observation, covering the PB process from its early to ideation phase to the current stage of proposal development for the final vote, we argue that the process has thus far been successful in blending online-offline components, largely supported by the active support of borough liaisons who have served as navigators between the different stages. From the point of co-creation, different stages of the PB process (ideation, co-creation) call for different strategies of online-offline participation. Effective mobilization of marginalized actors and interactions between public servants and citizens seem to benefit from face-to-face processes, while city-wide voting and discussion can effectively occur in the online platform.

Recently, digital democratic applications have increased in presence and scope. This study clarifies how civic applications – bottom-up technologies that use open data to solve governance and policy challenges – can contribute to democratic governance. While civic applications claim to deepen democracy, systematic frameworks for assessing the democratic potential of civic apps are missing, because apps are often evaluated against technical criteria. This study introduces a framework for evaluating the democratic potential of civic apps, distinguishing six criteria: inclusiveness, deliberation, influence, publicity, mobilization, and knowledge production. The framework is applied to a case study of the Finnish DataDemo competition in 2014 by analyzing the institutional design features of six civic applications. It is argued that in terms of democratic governance, the greatest potential of civic apps lies in enhancing publicity and mobilization, while they should not be expected to increase inclusiveness or direct influence in decisions. Thus, our study contributes to understanding how civic applications can improve democracy in times of open data abundance.