WeGov: Where eGovernment meets eSociety

Acronym of the case:

WeGov

Web address of the case:

http://www.wegov-project.eu

Country of the case:

Belgium , Germany , Greece , United Kingdom

Posting Date:

22 April 2010

Last Edited Date:

10 May 2010

Author:

Evika Karamagioli (consultant)

eParticipation | social network sites | egovernment

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

WeGov is a recently started three-year project supported by the European Commission aiming at the development of new tools allowing policy makers to interact with citizens and to understand their opinions by using well established public SNS â€“ Social networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

WeGov will harness the potential of the SNS by making it possible to introduce, detect, track and consider opinions and discussions on policy oriented topics including their origins, bias and evolution.Â Beyond this, WeGov will deliver software components having the potentiality to be deployed on cloud infrastructure to drastically lower the cost of the operations.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

eParticipation, eDemocracy and eVoting

Sector

Other

Date

February 2010 to February 2012

Target Users

Administrative | Citizen | Civil society

Target Users Description

The project's target group includes citizens and policy makers. WeGov will develop a toolset that allows taking full advantage of a wide range of existing and well established Social networking Sites to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of the governance and policymaking processes.

Scope

Pan-European

Status

Implementation

Language(s)

English | German

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The success of the SNS throughout the society provides unprecedented opportunities for policy makers (eGovernment) to engage with citizens (eSociety) through existing, open, well used and familiar settings.Â This is in stark contrast with the more common approach of using dedicated, ad-hoc, constrained and very often underestimated opinion soliciting platforms. WeGov will develop tools and techniques for closing the goop between policy makers and citizens.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Participation

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Mainly (or only) open standards | Open source software

Funding source

Public funding EU | Private sector

Project size

Implementation: €500-999,000

Yearly cost:

€49-299,000

Implementation and Management Approach

Three live field trials will be conducted by the Hansard Society in the UK, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) in Germany, and by Government to You in Greece.Â The trial results will be combined into a methodology, inclusive of a legal and ethical analysis and review by The Institute for Law and the Web at Southampton, and input from an international project Advisory Board.

Technology solution

WeGov will develop a toolset that allows taking advantage of a wide range of existing and well established social networking sites to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policymaking processes.

The tools will stimulate the discussion by introducing relevant policy topics to the appropriate communities in a secure and organised way. The tools will allow tracking the origins, bias and evolution of the opinions, providing therefore records to verify their proveniences and to protect them against misuse; the system will at the same time ensure trust and privacy for all parties involved.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

WeGov will develop tools and techniques for reducing the gap between policy makers and citizen.

Lessons learnt

The project has just started, therefore at the present phase there are no sufficient data allowing us to evaluate how can policy-makers improve the level of their collaboration with citizens with the use of the SNS; in the same way, it is early to estimate how can WeGov allow SNS to be an efficient tool forÂ policy discussions by reducing the effort required by theÂ manual tracking of conversations and the monitoring of topics and opinions across multiple sites.

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Showing 2 comments

Eirini Souri

1st WeGov Workshop Agenda and Official Invitation

19 October 2011 | 1058 Visits | Rating: 4.5 (maximum:5)

WeGov invites you to the 1st WeGov Workshop within e-2011, on 27thOctober 2011! Find more about the 1st WeGov Workshop as well as useful information on the Agenda and the event registration by clicking on the following link: http://www.epractice.eu/en/blog/5316971

1st WeGov Workshop within eChallenges 2011 (e-2011)

21 September 2011 | 1096 Visits | Rating: 3 (maximum:5)

WeGov is happy to announce the 1st WeGov Workshop within the
eChallenges 2011 (e-2011), on the 26th â€“ 28th October, 2011 in Florence, Italy.

The 1^st WeGov Workshop aims to demonstrate its toolkit to a
panel of experts and stakeholders in the field and gather their
feedback. The workshop will be the first within the project that opens
up project results in an iterative manner to a wider community of
interest. We encourage our readers to participate in this event to add
their voice to the many already shaping WeGov outcomes. The 1^st WeGov workshop will be held on the second day of the e-2011 conference, 27^th of October, 2011 (Workshop 7b: WeGov, 14:00).

eChallenges 2011, is the twenty-first in a series of Annual
Conferences supported by the European Commission and hosted by national
governments, which regularly attracts over 600 delegates from leading
commercial, government and research organisations around the world to
share knowledge and experience, lessons learnt, good practice and
innovation. The conference provides a prestigious, international forum to
share success stories and lessons learnt from applied Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) related research at European level (FP6
& FP7) as well as Regional, National and Commercial initiatives.
International cooperation and discussion of commercialisation,
exploitation & interoperability issues are key aspects of the
programme. The goals of e-2011 are to promote ICT knowledge sharing and
innovation between commercial organisations, government agencies and the
research community, exhange experiences about the current state of
eAdoption at a sectoral, national or regional level and stimulate rapid
take-up of Research and Technology Development (RTD) results by industry
and in particular SMEs.

Read original WeGov news article.

More information regarding the 1^st WeGov Workshop will be published soon.

Visit the WeGov project website: www.wegov-project.eu