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Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement: A Study on the Benefits of Integration with Social Networking

Published: 23 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Idea Management (IM) has increasingly been adopted in the civic domain as a tool to engage the citizenry in processes oriented toward innovating plans, policies, and services. While Idea Management Systems (IMSs), the software systems that instrument IM, definitely help manage this practice, they require citizens to be committed to a separate virtual space for which they need to register, they must learn how to operate it, and they must return to it frequently. This article presents an approach that integrates IMS with today’s most popular digital spaces of participation, the social networking sites, thus enabling citizens to engage in IM processes using ordinary tools and without having to step outside their daily habits. Our goal is to reach out and pull into IM those large and demographically diverse sectors of the society that are already present and participating in social networking sites. Through a real case study of IM in the public sector that mixed both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, our proposal demonstrates a promising approach to reduce the barriers of participation. We conclude with an analysis of the strengths and limitations of our proposal.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Social Computing
ACM Transactions on Social Computing  Volume 2, Issue 1
March 2019
105 pages
EISSN:2469-7826
DOI:10.1145/3309716
Issue’s Table of Contents
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Publication History

Published: 23 January 2019
Accepted: 01 August 2018
Revised: 01 June 2018
Received: 01 August 2017
Published in TSC Volume 2, Issue 1

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  1. Civic participation
  2. idea management
  3. open innovation
  4. social network

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  • (2021)A Hybrid Multi-Modal System for Conducting Virtual Workshops Using Interactive Voice Response and the WhatsApp Business APIExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451820(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
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