Pushing Open Government Through Social Media

Abstract

E-government aims to enhance the interaction between citizens, business, and government. Recently, the term open government is increasingly used to emphasize the importance of co-creation in governmental issues. In this study, the social media activities of the municipalities of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, are investigated with regard to the topic "open government" as one pillar of e-government. The findings show that user interaction is mostly represented through likes and shares and rarely by comments. A topic detection of the posted content reveals that different terms are covered by the municipalities and shows that open government is getting more and more diverse in recent years. The number of posts is still increasing each year on the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, but the topic of open government is still a peripheral phenomenon.

Understanding Decision-Making Needs of Open Government Data Users

“…Others have found that OGD portals situate the government as a data custodian rather than a service provider [13,14]. Although studies have examined policies [13,15], data sources [12,16], theoretical research on data publics [17], efforts to promote OGD portals on social media [18], and the use of these tools by technology-savvy users [19], we found that there is very limited research related to the feedback on the performance of open data portals and the use of this data from user's perspective as they engage in local decision-making processes.…”