Non-public eParticipation in Social Media Spaces

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of non-public social media spaces in contemporary democratic participation at the grassroots level, based on case studies of citizen-led, community and activist groups. The research pilots the concept of participation spaces to reify online and offline contexts where people participate in democracy. Participation spaces include social media presences, websites, blogs, email, paper media, and physical spaces. This approach enables the parallel study of diverse spaces (more or less public; on and offline). Participation spaces were investigated across three local groups, through interviews and participant observation; then modelled as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs) [1].This research provides an alternative and richer picture of social media use, within eParticipation, to studies solely based on public Internet content, such as data sets of tweets. In the participation spaces studies most communication takes place in non-public contexts, such as closed Facebook groups, email, and face-to-face meetings. Non-public social media spaces are particularly effective in supporting collaboration between people from diverse social groups. These spaces can be understood as boundary objects [2] and play strong roles in democracy. CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing ➝ Collaborative and social computing ➝ Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Investigating the online and offline contexts of day-to-day democracy as participation spaces

“…Most of the groups' activities took place in non-public contexts, such as closed Facebook Groups, email, and face-to-face meetings. Like an iceberg, with publicly visible events and campaigns above the waterline, the majority of participants' work was out of public view, on and offline (Taylor-Smith & Smith, 2016). This non-public participation included extensive learning and preparation, supporting a smaller amount of visible public action.…”

Governing in the digital age: The emergence of dynamic smart urban governance modes

“…The data analysis consisted of temporal bracketing to identify the sequence of events, using concepts from the literature to guide the analysis, namely, the heuristics of and modes of urban governance. Kling's heuristics have been proven helpful in sociotechnical studies (see Kreeger & Harindranath, 2017;Letch & Carroll, 2008;Taylor-Smith & Smith, 2016), as the governance modes have been used to understand the cities context (see Nesti, 2020;Przeybilovicz et al, 2022;Tomor et al, 2021). The strength of our approach lies in linking temporal bracketing, Kling's heuristics, and governance modes, all within the context of an in-depth longitudinal study involving two pertinent cases to observe the emergence of governance modes.…”