Do social networking groups support online petitions?

Abstract

Purpose EPetitioning has been emerging as arguably the most important eParticipation institutional activity. This paper aims to provide some insights into how ePetitions are perceived and supported by social networking sites. Design/methodology/approach The paper investigated the connection between the UK government's ePetitioning system and social networking groups linking to governmental petitions. Online data from Facebook were collected and analysed with respect to numbers of supporters compared to official signatures. Findings The results indicate that although the process of signing an official petition is not more complex than joining a Facebook group, the membership of respective Facebook groups can be much higher. In particular, certain topics experienced very high support on Facebook which did not convert to signatures. Originality/value The paper's added value lies in the questions raised about the potential uptake of citizengovernment interactions in policy making mechanisms.

Predicting Citizens Acceptance of Government-led e-Participation Initiatives through Social Media: A Theoretical Model

“…Therefore, many government-led eParticipation initiatives have been linked to several social media networks -in particular, Facebook and Twitter -in an effort to enhance citizens engagement [10,30,41,45]. Despite such efforts, the challenge of e-Participation initiatives to engage more citizens still remains [14,48,57].…”

e-Research applications for tracking online socio-political capital in the Asia-Pacific region

“…Both approaches require populating with an initial set of seed values. Online groups, causes, or political profile pages provide a suitable starting point as comments and friend lists can be used to infer a connection (Panagiotopoulos, Sams, Elliman, & Fitzgerald, 2011). Whilst both the initialisation process and data returned from the two approaches is similar, the mechanism to obtain the results is starkly different and the following sections will detail each approach and highlight the differences.…”

“…A program that utilises two or more APIs or combines data from an API and separate data through scraping from a website is commonly referred to as a mashup (Maximilien, Wilkinson, Desai, & Tai, 2007). Hybrid programs such as these have the potential to bridge the limitations present in APIs, and some examples of this approach would be to use search APIs to locate content on social networks and scrape off the fields of interest (Chen, Achrekar, Liu, & Lazarus, 2010), or, conversely, use data from social networks to locate links to external services and scrape content from the link in question (Panagiotopoulos et al, 2011).…”

A business model perspective for ICTs in public engagement

“…an ePetitioning bulletin), and assistance to campaign petitions through means such as social networks. The latter seems to be of increasing popularity and can lead to wider support and raising awareness, even beyond official signature numbers (Panagiotopoulos, Sams, Elliman, & Fitzgerald, 2011).…”