Citizen writing
From E-Consultation Guide
Contents |
Learning from your masters' stories
by Dr. D. R. Newman, Queen's University Management School.
a talk given at the SOCITM Web 2.0 event, Park Avenue Hotel, Belfast, 6 Feb. 2009.
What is Web 2.0, and how can it be used to engage people and communities with governments and businesses?
Web 2.0 is the writeable web
Of all the features of the over-hyped Web 2.0, the most important one is that:
- it is now easy for people to write on the WWW
- What is new about Web 2.0?
- shows how people are using features on Web 2.0
- to add writing, photographs, videos, ...,
- in order to express their opinions, share ideas with others, join communities.
Engaging communities using Web 2.0
How do know that your customers are satisfied with your services? Should you be doing things differently? What do stakeholders want from government? What do customers and suppliers want from businesses?
To find out, you need to engage people. We now have ICTs that you can use to learn from stakeholders.
- With two-way conversations,
- people don't just read what you tell them,
- but they can tell you what they think is important.
- This leads to:
- Reverse knowledge transfer
- e.g. from mother with experience of taking her children to school (the master),
- to a senior civil servant who lacks the experience (the apprentice)
- Increasing trust over time,
- (when customers or citizens begin to feel they are being taken seriously)
- Reverse knowledge transfer
- E-consultation and Web 2.0 shows how the writeable web can make a difference in one e-business area, that of e-government citizen engagement.
- HuWY is a new European project to do this on a large scale, getting thousands of young people discussing Internet governance.
- Uses of Web 2.0 in e-government considers why and when public bodies should use it.
Further reading
- www.e-consultation.org, including:
- Guide to e-consultation (particularly the examples and technology classification),
- and the research report.
- International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy.
- Democracies Online.
