APPROACH TO EPARTICIPATION THROUGH EFFICIENT EXPLOITATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Government agencies are making considerable investments for exploiting the capabilities offered by ICT, and especially the Internet, to increase citizens ’ engagement in their decision and policy making processes. However, this first generation of e-participation has been characterised by limited usage of the ‘official ’ e-consultation spaces of government agencies by the citizens. The emergence of Web 2.0 social media offers big opportunities for overcoming this problem, and proceeding to a second generation of broader, deeper and more advanced e-participation. This paper presents a methodology for the efficient exploitation of Web 2.0 social media by government agencies in order to broaden and enhance e-participation. It is based on a central platform which enables posting content and deploying micro web applications (‘Policy Gadgets’-Padgets) to multiple popular Web 2.0 social media, and also collecting users ’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings) in an efficient manner using their application programming interfaces (API). These interactions ’ data undergo various level