New ways for policy makers to interact with citizens through open social network sites - a report on initial results

WeGov (www.wegov-project.eu) is a recently started three year project supported by the European Commission to develop new tools that allow policy makers to interact with and understand the opinions of citizens by using well established public social networking sites (facebook, twitter, wordpress etc.). This paper will report initial findings on how to combine and address a range of issues, all of which are critical to success. These include: legal and ethical issues (e.g. privacy, data protection, defamation); risks of using SNS from different stakeholder perspectives including use of technical countermeasures (e.g. pseudo-anonymisation); the research and development of new technologies (e.g. opinion mining and information exchange processes); and most importantly an analysis of what has, and hasn’t worked in the past. All aspects are informing our three planned pilot scenarios and this interdisciplinary, integrated and iterative approach forms the core of the WeGov project