Abstract
While the purpose of public organizations is to serve citizens, the citizens themselves are not always consulted in order to develop better public services. We argue that the direct communication from citizens to public organizations contains a wealth of information on how the organizations could improve their services, and this information is worth exploring. In order to prove our argument, we have interviewed 19 public organizations in Rwanda and Sri Lanka, identified 26 issues raised by the citizens, and mapped these issues into four solution domains: availability and timeliness of information, policy development, business process development, availability and design of e-services.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Osborne, S.P., Radnor, Z., Strokosch, K.: Co-production and the co-creation of value in public services: a suitable case for treatment? Public Manag. Rev. 18(5), 639–653 (2016)
Nambisan, S., Nambisan, P.: Engaging Citizens in Co-creation in Public Services: Lessons Learned and Best Practices. IBM Center for the Business of Government (2013)
Linders, D.: From e-government to we-government: defining a typology for citizen coproduction in the age of social media. Gov. Inf. Q. 29(4), 446–454 (2012)
Scherer, S., Wimmer, M.A., Strykowski, S.: Social government: a concept supporting communities in co-creation and co-production of public services. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, pp. 204–209. ACM, New York, USA (2015)
Raikov, A.: Accelerating technology for self-organizing networked democracy. Futures (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.03.015
Sneiders, E., Byungura, J.C., Henkel, M., Perjons, E.: Potential of language technology to support public organizations and their communication channels in a developing country. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, pp. 236–244. ACM, New York, USA (2017)
Ruthven, I., Kelly, D. (eds.): Interactive Information Seeking, Behavior and Retrieval. Facet Publishing, London (2011)
Pabarskaite, Z., Raudys, A.: A process of knowledge discovery from web log data: systematization and critical review. J. Intell. Inf. Syst. 28(1), 79–104 (2007)
Sneiders, E.: Review of the main approaches to automated email answering. New Advances in Information Systems and Technologies. AISC, vol. 444, pp. 135–144. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31232-3_13
Warkentin, M., Gefen, D., Pavlou, P.A., Rose, G.M.: Encouraging citizen adoption of e-government by building trust. Electron. Mark. 12(3), 157–162 (2002)
Seckler, M., Heinz, S., Bargas-Avila, J.A., Opwis, K., Tuch, A.N.: Designing usable web forms: empirical evaluation of web form improvement guidelines. In: Proceedings of CHI 2014, pp. 1275–1284. ACM, New York, USA (2014)
Pappel, I., Pappel, I., Saarmann M.: Digital records keeping to information governance in Estonian local governments. In: Proceedings of i-Society 2012, pp. 199–204. IEEE (2012)
Weerakkody, V., El-Haddadeh, R., Al-Sobhi, F., Shareef, M.A., Dwivedi, Y.K.: Examining the influence of intermediaries in facilitating e-government adoption: an empirical investigation. Int. J. Inf. Manag. 33(5), 716–725 (2013)
Scholl, H.J.: Interoperability in e-Government: more than just smart middleware. In: Proceedings of HICSS 2005, pp. 123–123. IEEE (2005)
Boyne, G.A.: Sources of public service improvement: a critical review and research agenda. J. Public Admin. Res. Theor. 13(3), 367–394 (2003)
Skelcher, C.: Public-private partnerships, pp. 347–370. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
Karnani, A.: Fighting Poverty Together: Rethinking Strategies for Business, Governments, and Civil Society to Reduce Poverty. Springer, New York (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120235
Crié, D.: Consumers’ complaint behavior: taxonomy, typology and determinants: Towards a unified ontology. J. Database Mark. Cust. Strat. Manag. 11(1), 60–79 (2003)
Lee, S., Cude, B.J.: Consumer complaint channel choice in online and offline purchases. Int. J. Cons. Stud. 36(1), 90–96 (2012)
Meik, J., Brock, C., Blut, M.: Complaining customers as innovation contributors: stimulating service innovation through multichannel complaint management. In: Proceedings of SRII Global Conference 2014, pp. 125–132. IEEE (2014)
CIA: The World Factbook. Sri Lanka. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ce.html. Accessed 02 May 2018
Fields, G.S.: Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2012)
Robbins, M.D., Simonsen, B., Feldman, B.: Citizens and resource allocation: improving decision making with interactive web-based citizen participation. Public Admin. Rev. 68(3), 564–575 (2008)
Charalabidis, Y., Triantafillou, A., Karkaletsis, V., Loukis, E.: Public policy formulation through non moderated crowdsourcing in social media. In: Tambouris, E., Macintosh, A., Sæbø, Ø. (eds.) ePart 2012. LNCS, vol. 7444, pp. 156–169. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33250-0_14
Ferro, E., Loukis, E.N., Charalabidis, Y., Osella, M.: Policy making 2.0: from theory to practice. Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 359–368 (2013)
Bekkers, V., Edwards, A., de Kool, D.: Social media monitoring: responsive governance in the shadow of surveillance? Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 335–342 (2013)
Stamati, T., Papadopoulos, T., Anagnostopoulos, D.: Social media for openness and accountability in the public sector: cases in the Greek context. Gov. Inf. Q. 32(1), 12–29 (2015)
Kamateri, E., et al.: A comparative analysis of tools and technologies for policy making. In: Janssen, M., Wimmer, M.A., Deljoo, A. (eds.) Policy Practice and Digital Science. PAIT, vol. 10, pp. 125–156. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12784-2_7
Mergel, I.: A framework for interpreting social media interactions in the public sector. Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 327–334 (2013)
Loukis, E., Charalabidis, Y., Androutsopoulou, A.: Promoting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring. Gov. Inf. Q. 34(1), 99–109 (2017)
Michels, A., De Graaf, L.: Examining citizen participation: local participatory policy making and democracy. Local Gov. Stud. 36(4), 477–491 (2010)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the people in Rwanda and Sri Lanka who made this research possible. Thanks a lot to Sri Lanka Institute of Development Administration, without you we would never reach those 12 organizations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sneiders, E., Gunawardena, L., Rutabayiro Ngoga, S., Darayathna, R., Byungura, J.C. (2019). Potential for Improving Public Services by Exploring Citizens’ Communication to Public Organizations. In: Chugunov, A., Misnikov, Y., Roshchin, E., Trutnev, D. (eds) Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia. EGOSE 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 947. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13283-5_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13283-5_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13282-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13283-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)