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Community & Business Groups

E-Participation, Social Networks and the Well-informedness of Communities

During e-participation, participants produce, consume and review city-scale government data, documents and multimedia, including real-time varieties. Participants are well-informed about topics relevant to city governance, relevant to communities.

Journalists could be amongst e-participants and, alongside journalists, e-participants are envisioned as distributing information to communities. Members of communities beyond regular e-participants could also visit e-participation venues or utilize related online resources and services to become well-informed.

Social media could be a component of information distribution. Alongside local news, well-informed participants could post the real-time information of e-participation, of city governance, as well as other information. A large portion of the municipal governments in the United States are small and medium-sized cities; 80% of American cities have populations fewer than 10,000 people.

Collaborative and productivity software, the software of e-participation, facilitate city-scale government transparency. Local newspapers could utilize the same dashboard software of city governments to obtain situational awareness from city-scale government transparency data.

References

Helsley, Robert W., and Yves Zenou. “Social networks and interactions in cities.” Journal of Economic Theory 150 (2014): 426-466.

Huckfeldt, Robert, and John Sprague. “Networks in context: The social flow of political information.” American Political Science Review 81, no. 04 (1987): 1197-1216.

Huckfeldt, Robert, Paul Allen Beck, Russell J. Dalton, and Jeffrey Levine. “Political environments, cohesive social groups, and the communication of public opinion.” American Journal of Political Science (1995): 1025-1054.

Huckfeldt, Robert. “Networks, contexts, and the combinatorial dynamics of democratic politics.” Political Psychology 35, no. S1 (2014): 43-68.

Kennedy, Bruce M. “Community Journalism: A Way of Life.” (1974).

Lake, Ronald La Due, and Robert Huckfeldt. “Social capital, social networks, and political participation.” Political Psychology (1998): 567-584.

Yamamoto, Masahiro. “Community newspaper use promotes social cohesion.” Newspaper Research Journal 32, no. 1 (2011): 19.

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