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
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